Week 2: Grilled bananas with passion fruit sauce

You won't believe how happy I was when passion fruit were added to GW2 with 'The Lost Shores'. I adore passion fruit, and if it weren't for the fact that it's not the most environmentally friendly fruit when you live in Northern Europe, I would eat it all the time. It goes well with so many other fruits, and has such an intense, unique flavour! So I immediately went for a recipe for which I had all the ingredients in my pantry: this week, we're making grilled bananas with passion fruit sauce!

As my mother said when tasting this recipe, 'If you have any cavities, you're sure to find out with the first bite'. It's sweet and tart and stuffed with calories - this is not a recipe for the dieters among us. You can make this recipe with regular bananas, but you can also use those big green-and-black bananas used in Indonesian kitchen for baking (the blacker, the riper; go for black). The pictures in this recipe show regular bananas. Grilling is of course the method of choice, but you can go ahead and bake your bananas if it's more convenient.

 

Grilled bananas with passion fruit sauce

Ingredients (4 portions):

4 bananas

2 passion fruits

100 g sugar

35 g + 1 tsp butter

1 vanilla bean

Scrape the insides of the vanilla bean to get all the marrow out, but reserve the pod. Melt 35 g of butter, add the sugar and stir over a low heat until the sugar is dissolved. Keep stirring until the mixture turns slightly brown. Add the vanilla marrow, the empty bean and the pulp of both passion fruits. Heat for another 5 minutes and keep stirring! You don't want this to burn now that you've added a precious vanilla bean and 2 passion fruits. Turn off the heat and strain the sauce into a bowl. It should be very thick and have a caramel-like colour. Don't do this too long in advance, as the sauce will solidify when cooled down.

Preheat the grill, or heat the remaining butter in a large frying pan. Cut the bananas in half lengthwise; you can juggle with them like this or you can cut each piece in half again for a more manageable size. Place the pieces under the grill for a few minutes until they're done. If baking, add the pieces of banana cut side down to the pan when the butter is hot. Bake for 2 minutes, then carefully flip over and bake for another 2 minutes. Arrange the pieces of banana on a plate and pour over the passionfruit sauce. Enjoy!