How to Ripen Bananas – Ripe Bananas Fast for Baking or Freezing

Ripe bananas are a baker’s best friend, as green bananas can totally ruin an impromptu baking session at home. Ripe bananas are dotted with spots and are soft to the touch, which might make whisking up batter that much easier. But most importantly, they’re much sweeter than green bananas, as bananas’ starch content is converted into sugars during the ripening process, making it a better fit for a sweet treat. Most bakers will tell you that cakes, breads, and pies will taste much differently when made with green bananas compared to ripe bananas, as the unripened fruit contains much more starch overall.

Bananas ripen naturally over time, so you may be inclined to skip cooking with them until they’ve become mushy to the touch, usually in a few days time. Even if you may only have access to green bananas, don’t throw in the towel just yet — there are actually two different ways to ripen a banana, one of which might help you in just a few minutes. Below, we’re sharing a few hacks from our Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen that any baker can use on the fly at home.

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First, how do bananas ripen naturally?

Just like many other fruits you pick up at the grocery store or the farmer’s market, bananas ripen over time after they’ve been exposed to a gas called ethylene. Ethylene is found in plenty of fruits and vegetables, and in the case of bananas, exposure to the gas in steady amounts can trigger the ripening process. Depending on how bananas are stored, they can ripen slowly over a week’s time, according to researchers at Cornell University — or they can become ripe in as quickly as 24 hours.

If your bananas are perfectly ripe, and you’d like to keep them that way, banana hammocks or hooks are designed to allow ethylene gas to dissipate. Try to break up your bananas and don’t store them in a bunch, as you’ll avoid bruising this way and also keep all of the bananas equally ripe.

How to ripen and soften bananas:

There are two ways to speedily achieve perfectly sweet, mushy bananas for all of your baking needs. Kate Merker, Good Housekeeping’s Chief Food Director, prefers the au natural way to do it — if you have an extra 24 to 48 hours or if you plan ahead, it’s the easiest way to achieve perfect ripeness. Otherwise, you’ll work to soften your bananas instead.

1. Use a brown paper bag. Trapping the ethylene gas inside the bag pushes the fruit to ripen more quickly. If you have green bananas now and need them to be speckled tomorrow, Merker says it’s best to throw in an apple with the bunch, too. “The apple produces additional ethylene gas alongside the bananas, which speeds ripening.” Yellow spotted bananas are perfect for snacking, and brown bananas that are mushy make for perfect additions to any of your favorite baking recipes.
2. Toss them in the oven. While Merker doesn’t personally attest to this method, nifty home cooks in a pinch have used hot ovens to draw out sugars in green bananas. Reddit users describe how roasting bananas in the oven at lower temperatures (nothing above 250°F) for 20 minutes can soften them as well as caramelize sugars inside of them, making them much easier to bake with than if you hadn’t done so in the first place. While this hack won’t render identical results as the natural method would, it’s better for baking in the long term and can be done in a pinch.

If you’re adverse to baking your bananas, Merker says her last tip would be to blitz your bananas in a blender or a food processor. Doing so will allow you to mash them more efficiently than you would be able to do by hand, and also might make for a seamless transition into your recipe’s batter.

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