Why It Works
- A pinch of salt highlights all the other flavors and helps balance the caramel’s sweetness.
- This dessert comes together quickly and easily in a single skillet in just minutes.
I will be the first to tell you that I am not a baker. I don’t mean that I can’t bake, I can—if you doubt me, watch me make the infamous pecan pie recipe that Stella Parks deemed so difficult she refused to release to the public. For me, baking usually involves more effort than I care to expend on dessert, a part of the meal that I consider fully optional. This means that my sweet spot for desserts is anything with a great effort-to-reward ratio, and if the bananas Foster is anything, it’s that.
What makes bananas Foster so great is how high it scores on all the following metrics: Easy to make? Check. Impressive? Check, check. Delicious? Check, check, check. Pyrotechnics? Check, check, check, check, check, and…IGNITION.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Those flames can be a deterrent, though. Recipes that involve setting a bonfire to a skillet can be intimidating, so let’s address this. First, you don’t have to light the alcohol on fire, you can successfully simmer the caramel with the booze until the caramel reaches a good stage for serving; the alcohol will mostly have cooked off at that point anyway. But second, lighting it on fire really isn’t that hard. Just think about who traditionally makes bananas Foster. (Hint: It’s not the chefs.) I’ll explain.
Flash in the Pan: Why the Origins of Bananas Foster Explain Its Ease
Bananas Foster is a New Orleans classic, invented in the 1950s at the restaurant Brennan’s in honor of Richard Foster, the city’s crime commissioner at the time. Watch any video of bananas Foster being made at Brennan’s (there are a lot!), and you’ll notice that this is one of those tableside desserts that restaurants like to do for a little dining-room theatrics. I mean, I get it, the pyrotechnics are cool.
But you can only do tableside service for dishes that are easy to make, for a couple reasons. First, the dish has to be quick and simple enough to prepare using minimal gear and ingredients. It doesn’t work to have the maître d’ pull up a cooking trolley and then slowly stir a pot in front of you while saying, “And now we’ll keep cooking this roux for another 45 minutes until it’s dark enough for a proper gumbo. Care for a cocktail?”
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
And that’s the other thing: It’s usually a maître d’ or other front-of-house staff doing the cooking, not the actual cooks in the kitchen, and while I mean no disrespect, being a great cook isn’t part of any front-of-house job description. So a tableside dish like bananas Foster has to be something the wait staff and management can quickly learn to whip up successfully on repeat with a side of flair and repartee.
None of it will work if it’s a difficult or time-consuming dish to make.
Look How Easy!
I can write all day about how contextual clues are proof that bananas Foster is easy, but I can also just tell you. It’s this easy:
- Melt butter and brown sugar in a pan along with a pinch of salt and warm spices like cinnamon and nutmeg.
- Add bananas and cook as caramel forms.
- Add booze and light it on fire. Cook until flames die down and caramel looks good.
- Serve with ice cream.
One note on the booze: In the original recipe from Brennan’s, both rum and banana liqueur go into the pan. I considered calling for banana liqueur here too, but ultimately decided against it. I’m sure there are some legitimate uses for banana liqueur and perhaps some of you reading this already have a bottle in your liquor cabinet. But I can’t in good conscience call for an ingredient with such limited utility when you really don’t need it here. The bananas in the pan are banana-y enough, the rum tastes great, you will not miss it.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
That said, if you have banana liqueur and want to add a splash, please do—though as with all flambés, never pour directly from any bottle of booze directly into the pan with a flame under it, lest the fire leap up and light the whole bottle on fire. The goal is to flambé the alcohol in the pan, not make a Molotov cocktail.
The classic way to serve bananas Foster is with some ice cream, usually vanilla but I say have fun with whatever flavor appeals to you (photographed here: stracciatella). This raises a kind of definitional question that I’d like to leave you with: Is bananas Foster a dessert unto itself, in which à la mode is the typical way to serve it? Or are we really just making a banana–flavored caramel sauce for ice cream? My god, maybe it’s nothing more than an à la minute banana split, served hot. I think I just lit my brain on fire.
Your questions, answered
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You want bananas that are ripe but firm, typically indicated by a yellow peel with minimal brown spotting, so that they hold their shape as you cook them. Bananas that are very ripe (noticeable levels of browning on the peel) are at risk of breaking down during cooking, while under-ripe (green) bananas can be too starchy and not sweet enough. For more information on how to control banana ripening at home, read all about our testing of banana storage and tips.
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Much of the alcohol from the rum will cook off during cooking, but not all of it. We’ll leave the decision up to parents as to whether you’re comfortable with your kids eating some residual alcohol in the sauce, but to be safe, it’s probably best not to serve this to younger children.
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In a dish like this, you really can use all sorts of rum—combined with the caramel, bananas, and spices, the nuances of the rum’s flavor will largely be lost. That said, an aged rum (meaning, a brown one) will pair nicely with the sweet, caramel notes of the sauce.
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Any time there are live flames, there is risk. Generally speaking, it can be safe to flambé if you follow some precautions. Most importantly, don’t pour directly from the bottle of alcohol into the pan to avoid the flame leaping up into the full bottle of alcohol, and make sure your work area is clear of flammable items. If cooking over a gas flame, you can turn it off right before adding the alcohol and then turn it right back on, just to be extra safe. If lighting the flambé with a match, it is safer to use a long-reach match to keep your hand away from the flames (a long grill lighter could work also). Finally, you can avoid the flames altogether by simply simmering the sauce while the alcohol evaporates; as noted above, you won’t cook off all the alcohol but you will still cook off much of it.
