How To Freeze Bananas

Bananas are cheap, available year-round, and always good to have on hand. They're great in banana pancakes, delicious in fruit smoothies, and the essential ingredient in our best-ever banana bread. Sometimes, I get a little greedy at the store and bite off more than I can chew: a ginormous bunch of bananas can pass over from vibrant green to speckled ripeness in the blink of an eye if I'm not watching. Thank goodness for my freezer, because if there's one thing I love more than a ripe banana, it's a frozen ripe banana. Follow our tips below the next time you have way more bananas than you can use.

The best time to freeze a banana

How ripe is too ripe? That's really up to you. Some like it before the freckles set in, and others won't consider a banana ripe unless it's...totally brown. I like it best when speckles cover about 1/3 of the banana, when I can smell the banana from halfway across the room, and right before it starts to get soft to the touch. If you like 'em sweeter, wait a little longer: the browner they get, the higher the sugar-to-starch ratio. Just know that they will also be a little mushier and messier to handle once they're that ripe. 

To peel or not to peel

Peel 'em. Always! Leaving the peel on will mean that you have to wait for the whole banana to defrost before you can use it, which limits the application of your defrosted banana to baking (and makes an awful, slimy mess). Frozen bananas are amazing in smoothies and nice creams (or for eating straight out of the freezer for a quick, cold treat), so we want to make sure there's no peel involved when they head into the freezer. 

Once peeled, you get to decide the size you want your banana to be broken down to. We like to cut them down to 1/2" to 3/4" rounds so that they're easily blendable for your food processor and quicker to defrost if you want to use them for baking. 

Use parchment!

Make sure that your baking sheet will fit inside your freezer first, then line it with either parchment paper or a nonstick silicone mat and arrange the banana rounds in a single layer. The parchment will ensure an easy release and smooth transfer into a resealable plastic bag once the bananas are frozen all the way through. The bananas will keep indefinitely in the freezer,  but we recommend using them within 3 months for best flavor.