Banana Flower

The inflorescence of the banana plant contains many petal-like bracts between rows of flowers. The female flowers, which can develop into fruit, appear in rows further up the stem than the rows of male flowers. The banana fruits develop from the banana heart in a large hanging cluster called a bunch. Each blossom weighs about 500-600 g. Beneath the bracts lies a row of yellowish fronds. Left to mature, those fronds would eventually become bananas.

The tough purplish-red outer bracts are discarded because they are unpleasantly astringent and tough to eat. The creamy inner bracts are the ones to use, and they can be bitter. They work well raw in salads, or cooked to complement a curry or stir-fry. Cut bracts rapidly discolour in air, so they should be immediately plunged into salted or sugared acidulated water to prevent browning. Both the fleshy part of the bracts and the heart are edible, as with artichokes. Kilawin na pusô ng saging is a Filipino dish of banana flowers. Banana flowers are used as a vegetable in South Asian and Southeast Asian cuisine, and their flavor resembles that of artichoke.

A headspace solid-phase microextraction analysis of banana flowers identified 31 compounds, accounting for 97.78% of the total volatiles. Nonanal was the largest single ingredient in the flowers, at 72.67% of the volatiles. Hexanal, 2-pentyl-furan, octanal, isoamyl butyrate and nonanal were among the volatile compounds found at high concentration in the two herbs, the flowers and the bracts. Flowers and bracts share 11 compounds.

Musa acuminata is a species of banana native to Southern Asia, and many modern edible dessert bananas are derived from it. It has been suggested that Musa acuminata may have originally been domesticated for parts other than the fruit, such as fiber, construction materials or its edible male bud. It is likely that banana blossoms were eaten before the banana fruit, which when first discovered mainly comprised seeds rather than pulp.