Bananas

Like mangos, Southeast Asian bananas come in all shapes and sizes. Ripe bananas are eaten out of hand as snacks. A favorite treat is to coat them in sesame batter and then deep-fry them. In Vietnam, unripe bananas are shaved thin and used as an astringent accompaniment to salads and noodle dishes. Smaller varieties are sliced lengthwise, and larger varieties are slivered in thin discs. While the familiar Cavendish variety we know in the U.S. has been bred so that its seeds are nothing more than tiny specks, some smaller Southeast Asian varieties actually have sizable seeds. The blossoms of banana trees are also important to Southeast Asian cooking. Thai: gloo-ay, Malay: pisang; Vietnamese: chuối