Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

Table 2. Fruits that don’t ripen after picking and fruits that do

DON’T RIPEN AFTER PICKING (non climacteric)

CONTINUE TO RIPEN AFTER PICKING (climacteric)

cherry

apple

citrus fruits (orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit)

apricot

cucumber

avocado

grape

banana

pineapple

blueberry

pomegranate

fig

soft berries (blackberry, raspberry, strawberry)

guava

watermelon

honeydew

kiwifruit

mango

muskmelon (inaccurately called cantaloupe in the U.S.)

nectarine

papaya

passion fruit

peach

pear

persimmon

plantain

plum

quince

tomato

Poached Italian Prune Plums

Raw Italian prune plums are dusky purple and bland, with a mere hint of sweetness that won’t improve much on standing at room temperature. But when poached in sugar syrup, they rev up their color and flavor, becoming crimson and tart-sweet. Look for them in the market from late summer through early fall. Poached prune plums are both delicious and beautiful served either plain or with vanilla ice cream.

1 pound Italian prune plums

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

1 small cinnamon stick, about 2 inches long

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.Wash the plums and halve them, but do not peel. Remove the pits.

2.In a large saucepan, combine the sugar, water, and cinnamon stick and bring to a boil over medium heat. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring often, until the sugar dissolves and a light syrup forms.

3.Add the plum halves, reduce the heat to low, and poach gently, spooning the liquid over the plums occasionally and turning them once during the cooking, for 3 to 4 minutes, or until tender. Stir in the vanilla.

4.Serve the plums warm or cool with their syrup.

MAKES ABOUT 8 SERVINGS

SMASHED BUT SWEET

Why do the brown, bruised parts of fruits often taste sweeter than the other parts?

Think about this: If you smashed all the bottles of chemicals in a chemistry lab with a baseball bat, you wouldn’t be surprised at any unusual chemical reactions that occured as their spilled contents ran together on the floor, would you?

Well, plants are made up of remarkably packaged, exquisitely organized little “bottles of chemicals” called cells. When physical damage is done to a fruit, the cells are broken open and the chemicals that were previously isolated from one another in different parts of the cells spill out and mix.

When you bruise or cut into an apple, pear, or avocado, for example, the damaged flesh soon turns brown from the action of oxidizing enzymes called polyphenol oxidases, which are released from their captivity as soon as the cell walls are broken. These enzymes act upon the fruit’s phenols, a large group of antioxidant compounds responsible for flavor, color, and many other characteristics of our edible plants, sending them along a chemical path leading to a variety of large molecules (polymers), many of which are brown in color.

This so-called enzymatic browning—to distinguish it from both caramelization and Maillard browning (see Chapter 7)—can be minimized by deactivating the enzymes with heat (in other words, cook those apples promptly) or with an acid. Lemon and lime juices are the most acidic substances in our kitchens, more acidic than vinegar.

Instead of destroying the oxidation-encouraging enzyme, we can cut off the oxygen to the cells, for example by covering the cut surface of the fruit with plastic wrap. Or we could treat it with any of a variety of chemical compounds that inhibit oxidation, such as sulfur dioxide, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), or citric acid in the form of (again) lemon juice.

In some fruits, the enzyme-driven browning reactions do produce sweet sugars. But in others, including apples, sour acids or bitter flavors are produced.

So don’t physically abuse your fruits in an effort to make them sweeter. Uninjured fruits always look and taste best.

ATOMIC BANANAS

Banana for banana, does a sweeter one have more calories than a dull-tasting one? As they ripen, they definitely do get sweeter, but can they produce more calories just by sitting around, or is that creating energy?

You answered your own question. Yes, that would be creating calories, and calories are energy. Energy can come only from other forms of energy (heat, mechanical, electrical, and so on) or from matter via E = mc 2. If a banana knew how to convert matter into energy, as uranium does, we could make atomic “B-bombs” out of them.

I can guess what you’re thinking, though. More sugar, more calories, right? But where is that sugar coming from? As the fruit ripens, starches are being broken down into sugars, and both starch and sugar—in fact, all digestible carbohydrates—give us the same 4 calories of energy per gram when we metabolize them. It’s a calorie-for-calorie wash. It doesn’t matter whether the sugar molecules are still tied together as starch molecules or free as a bird.

So you can’t run a power plant on ripening bananas unless you set fire to an awful lot of them—not an easy job because their flesh is 75 percent water. Even if dried first, they would burn to release only 400 calories per pound of original banana. Compare that with a pound of coal, which burns to release 3,000 calories, or a pound of uranium, which can release 21 million calories.

The only way bananas could solve an energy problem would be for a tired athlete to carbo-load by eating a whole bunch of them at 27 grams of carbohydrate per banana.

THE SECOND BANANA

I bought some big, green bananas in a Latin American grocery store and put them on my kitchen windowsill to ripen. When they eventually turned yellow, I tried to eat one, but it was tough and tasted like chalk. What kind of bananas were they?

They weren’t bananas; they were plantains, tropical fruits closely related to bananas—both members of the genus Musa —but much starchier and containing much less sugar when ripe. They’re also known as cooking bananas, which is a clear tip-off that they’re not meant to be eaten raw.

Plantains are a staple in Africa and especially in Latin America, where they are known as plátanos in Spanish. In Puerto Rico, for example, plátanos are made into a variety of crunchy appetizers, including tostones (round slices of green plantain, flattened, fried, and garlic-salted) and arañitas or “little spiders” (fried, ragged pancakes of shredded plantain). Soft, ripe plantains, called amarillos (“yellows”) are baked with butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon in a Caribbean version of Bananas Foster. (See following recipe.)

And by the way, the old windowsill-ripening ploy is sill-y. It was originally intended as a dependably sunny spot, but picked fruits don’t need sunlight to ripen.

Bananas Byczewski