How to clean a banana blossom (flower)

Take your banana blossom. It can be found in Asian shops (Indian, Thai, Sri Lankan). Note the intense colour on the outer leaves.

Start opening the outer leaves one by one. Under each leaf you will find a group of long pale yellow flowers. If they would have reached maturity, each of them would have turned into a yummy banana.

More flowers...

Keep repeating the first 2 steps: open the leaf, collect flowers, discard leaf.

While peeling, the leaves will get softer and paler in colour and the flowers will get smaller.

Keep peeling until you reach the white yellow flower heart. Put in a bowl, add cold water, lemon juice to avoid discolouring of the heart.

Now comes the hard work, get ready to clean the flowers!

Pick a flower, open, observe the inside...

Like this. Pull the feathery plastic like petal back, observe the matchstick like stem inside the flower. You have to remove both, otherwise your banana flowers will be hard and bitter.

This is how it looks like: cleaned flower, stem, petal. Keep the flower, discard the rest.

Unopened flower... Notice the appearance of it. Open the flower by gently rubbing the end of it in between your fingers and gently push the petals back.

The flowers closer to the heart will get smaller and smaller and will get harder and harder to clean. When you can't clean anymore, just separate the flowers.

Cut the hard ends if you like, or not. I didn't. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the cleaned chopped flowers, just chop them small.

After chopping them small, they are ready to cook. Make sure you don't start chopping them without having your recipe and your ingredients ready, they discolour quickly.

Keep them in cold lemony water until needed, drain and squeeze well.

Chop the heart small too, work quickly as it's very starchy and it discolours quickly. Apparently you can find canned banana blossom hearts too, they are similar to artichoke hearts in taste.

I have stored the whole cleaned flowers and the banana blossom heart in the fridge in cold lemony water for 2 days. They turned light brown, if you don't mind it the taste should be the same.

Good luck with it! Please be gentle, this is my very first guide ever. Thank you for watching. Please let me know if you have any yummy recipes for it! 🍴