Nilagang saging

Saba boiled in their skins in salted water and eaten plain, with nothing added at all.

Vegan.

Ingredients

• 12 saba bananas, unpeeled
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1.5 litres water

Method

1. IN THEIR SKINS, AND NOTHING IS ADDED. This is the plainest page on this site and that is the point of it: no sugar, no coconut, no syrup, no frying. Boiled in the skin the fruit steams in its own moisture instead of taking up water, and comes out dense and faintly savoury rather than sweet and waterlogged.
2. Use saba that are just ripe -- yellow with a few black marks. Green ones stay starchy and chalky; very ripe ones go to mush inside the skin.
3. Leave them whole and unpeeled. Trim nothing.
4. Bring the water to a boil with the tablespoon of salt. The salt is there for the water, not the fruit, and it does reach through the skin.
5. Bananas in, weighted with a plate if they float, and boiled steadily 20 to 25 minutes.
6. Test with a skewer through the skin at the thickest point. It should go through with no resistance at all.
7. Drain and let them stand 5 minutes before peeling. Peeled straight out of the pan they are too hot to handle and the flesh tears away with the skin.
8. Peel and eat warm, on their own or with a cup of coffee, or with a saucer of salt. Cold they go firm and are good with cheese.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Philippines · All recipes