Fast delivery
Get in as fast as 1 hour
It’s all local
Shop your favorites
Direct chat
Connect with shoppers
Green Bananas Delivery or Pickup
The Instacart guide to green bananas
About green bananas
Green bananas, or raw bananas, are available year-round. They're small or medium, elongated, and slightly curved. The peels are thick and green. Its texture is fibrous, and the taste is bitter. The flesh of green bananas, a white or cream color, is dense and firm. It has a creamy texture with infertile seeds at its center, if it has seeds at all. Green bananas are fragrant and have a tart flavor with a starchiness that sticks to the mouth. The sugars have yet to develop for these young fruits, so they taste kind of like potatoes when you cook them.
Bananas belong to the same genus as a plantain, a genus called Musa. Simply, green bananas are immature fruits from a variety of bananas, including apple bananas and Cavendish bananas. The largest producer of raw bananas is India, particularly southern India, where the temperatures and environment are ideal for their growth. They're also prevalent in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, where they're also known as Caribbean figs.
How to pick out green bananas
The art of picking out green bananas is as simple as the art of choosing ripened yellow bananas, except the opposite. When shopping for yellow bananas, the idea is to find bananas with little to no green. When shopping for green bananas, you want fruit that has very little yellow on it, if any. You can also shop via the Instacart app and have your order delivered to your door in as little as 2 hours!
How to store and preserve green bananas
Once you've chosen your green bananas and brought them home, the key to keeping their starchy goodness intact is preventing them from further ripening. First, store the green bananas away from other fruits. Other fruits' enzymatic actions can affect other nearby bananas, making them ripen faster. Wrapping the stems in either plastic or foil will also slow the bananas' own enzymatic reactions. Some people choose to give their green bananas a vinegar bath, or soak them in an acetic fruit juice, like lemon or lime, and then rinse them before preparing them.
The easiest way to slow the ripening of green bananas is by freezing them. Frozen, the bananas will stay fresh for weeks. The key here is to store them in a freezer bag, which is easier if you separate the bananas from one another. If they aren't in an airtight container while stored in the freezer, the peel of the banana will turn black. This doesn't mean they're rotten, but it means the starchy trademark of a green banana has metabolized into sugars.
Green Bananas Near Me
Buy your favorite Green Bananas online with Instacart. Order Green Bananas from local and national retailers near you and enjoy on-demand, contactless delivery or pickup within 2 hours.
FAQs about green bananas
As with most things related to health, the answer is, it depends. An unripened banana, with its green and waxy skin, is firm and bitter since it is around 40 percent starch. It also has a low glycemic index and takes longer to digest than its ripened yellow counterpart. It is a significant source of potassium, dietary fiber, and it even has a little protein.
The plus side of green bananas is their high-starch, low-sugar content, making them a wonderful food for someone who has Type 2 diabetes. They also have a probiotic bacterium, which is good for colon health and helps you absorb more nutrients, like calcium, from other foods. The other side of the argument is that unripe bananas' antioxidant levels are lower. Their antioxidant properties increase with their age, and some people experience bloating or gas after eating green bananas because of the higher resistant starch.
Yes, one of the simplest ways to cook green bananas is by boiling them. You can cook them with or without the skin. Add them to boiling water and cook for 15 to 20 minutes. If you've left it on, remove the skin after they've cooled slightly, and serve them hot! For some cozy South Indian cuisine, make banana pakoras. Coat the raw bananas with a batter mixed from rice flour, red chili powder, and turmeric powder, then deep fry them until golden brown and serve with your favorite dipping sauce.
Koftas are a Northern Indian food made with raw bananas. Served with tomato, potato, cinnamon, and ginger, it's a warm and lovely dish, great for house parties or impressing dinner guests. You can also toss them into your favorite curry dish for a spin on traditional food.
Bananas, like many other fruits, ripen because of ethylene. Natural to the fruit, this ripening changes its color, texture, aroma, and flavor through a chemical reaction. To keep the starches in green bananas from turning to sugars, thus ripening and causing the bananas to turn yellow, cultivators of green bananas pick the fruit before the process starts. As a result, some green bananas may never ripen because they didn't fully mature on the plant. However, bananas picked when they're more mature will metabolize the starches into sugar, turning them yellow.