Orchard Training Cookery Club - Alternative to Bananas (part 2)

Last week, during our Orchard Training Cookery Club meeting we talked about using alternative to bananas because of the food miles, and we tried out apple puree as an alternative. This week we used sweet potato. We used the same simple banana bread recipe as last week and replaced the 300g of banana with sweet potato puree. We peeled and sliced the sweet potato, boiled it and well drained it before mashing it.

This week, we blind tasted all three, the banana, apple and potato and this is what we found:

Taste: everyone could identify the banana one, (we suspect because we knew that there was a banana sample and our tongues were looking out for it) Surprising though this week nobody identified the apple as bland or tasteless. However, the sample that won on taste was the sweet potato.

Texture: Both the banana and sweet potato was pushed firmly into second place after the apple. For some reason the apple was not so wet, it was light and fluffy.

We then decided to look for alternative or secondary uses of the breads, we tried all three of them as toast including the leftover apple and cobnut bread from our last session. All four of them went into the toaster, but they had very different results. The banana and apple slices were fine, but the sweet potato slices were way better. The clear winner, however, was the apple and cobnut bread. We are not sure if it’s the toasted nuts or if the bread was stale that made the difference, but the taste and texture was outstanding.

Finally, we made eggy bread (also known as French toast or Poor Knight), the sweet potato won on taste for the second time.

On conclusion, we thought that sweet potato was the best alternative to banana, the results have been pasted to the Orchard Training Garden Club. We are asking them to grow a few more sweet potatoes. However, we still have a freezer load frozen apple and kgs of dried of apples from the homeschool garden to use up, so we will continue to seek new ways to cook and bake with them.

I have been asked by the Orchard Training Cookery Club to add a footnote here. They really liked the experiments, but out of banana bread with lots of dark chocolate, plain banana bread, apple bread, apple and cobnut bread and sweet potato bread there clear and overall winner was banana bread with lots of dark chocolate. When asked about how they felt about that - the reply was “it's complicate!” Food miles are an issue for them, but foods with tastes we love and enjoy have a place. This one experiment won’t stop the global trade and ingredients having lots of food miles any time soon, but sweet potato bread has made it our Homeschool Cookery Book.