It's Time To Embrace The Grilled Banana Split

Banana splits have been a classic dessert for well over a century. The three scoops of ice cream plopped into a banana, which is sliced straight down the middle, and then topped with chocolate syrup and maraschino cherries, dates back to 1904 when it was invented in a Pennsylvania drugstore. It's a simple enough dessert to make, since none of the ingredients involve much preparation, unless you're using an ice cream maker. That said, if you're willing to extend the dessert's prep time by a fairly small amount, you might consider grilling your banana before you put it under the knife.

Grilling a banana does two things: It sweetens the flavor and it softens the texture. Both of these can elevate a banana split, adding to an already sweet dessert's flavor while giving the banana split a creamy base, which is closer in consistency to the ice cream scoops on top. If you decide to try it, go with a banana that's a little less than ripe, because an underripe banana is more firm when you start grilling it. You want the finished, grilled banana to be soft and creamy, but still firm enough that it doesn't collapse underneath a heavy load of ice cream.

Fruits like bananas certainly don't need to be grilled, but it helps, and it only takes about seven minutes of cooking. Its sweeter flavor comes from the caramelization process, which goes on inside the fruit while it's cooking. Bananas contain natural sugars which react to heat, and this turns them a browner color, bringing out new, sweet flavors. Grilling helps preserve some of the banana's natural vitamins in ways that sauteing or frying it would not, because grilling is a quicker process that doesn't destroy so many nutrients. A grilled banana tastes similar to plátanos fritos (fried plantains).

It's not necessary, but since you're playing with that sweetness, it's common to add brown sugar or cinnamon when you're grilling a banana. They can be served by themselves this way, but there are plenty of desserts they'll fit into; a banana split certainly wouldn't suffer from a bit of brown sugar. The color of brown sugar comes from molasses, which gives it a caramel flavor as well. If you enjoy the buttery taste of caramel, brown sugar and grilled bananas together gives you more of it in your banana split.

Most variations of a banana split should work fine with grilled bananas, whether you prefer three scoops of plain vanilla or three Neapolitan scoops of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Nuts are always optional on a banana split, and it could be interesting to mess around with the crunchy texture of peanuts when the grilled base is softer than usual.

A simpler dish which requires bananas to be cooked would be bananas Foster, a simple classic and a sadly discontinued Häagen-Dazs flavor which is like a more bare-bones banana split: just cooked bananas, vanilla ice cream, and walnuts, in rum sauce instead of chocolate or strawberry sauce. Working with walnuts or rum syrup to bring in those bananas Foster elements could be something to consider. Or, if you truly want an all-banana banana split, you can whip up banana soft-serve "ice cream" by freezing and blending sliced bananas, and then scooping that onto the grilled banana instead. As far as desserts go, it's healthy, especially if you substitute a normal cherry instead of the more sugary maraschino cherries.