Ree Drummond's Brutally Honest Feelings About Bananas
If you're looking for a way to use up your ripe bananas, Ree Drummond's recipes aren't the place to look. The Food Network chef has been pretty vocal about her dislike of the fruit and doesn't often include them in her recipes — and you'll certainly never catch her eating a banana every day.
"I hate, abhor, loathe, and recoil at the sight of bananas," Drummond wrote in a blog post — ironically while sharing a recipe for bananas foster. She noted that she created the recipe only because she thought her readers might want it and not because it was a personal favorite. Her dislike of the fruit remained evident throughout the post, but she did taste test it and admit that "it wasn't bad" — though she did remove the bananas to eat the dessert.
It's not just one specific aspect that Drummond dislikes. She finds the taste and texture of the fruit off-putting. She noted that she has purposefully "never eaten a whole banana", and most accidental ingestions were "promptly spit out into a napkin." Even the smell is unappealing to her.
Some of Drummond's family members dislike the fruit, too
According to her blog post, the Pioneer Woman's dislike of bananas goes back to her childhood. Although bananas are a common baby food, Drummond shares that she didn't care for the taste even as an infant. She even signed off as "The Lifelong Banana Hater" on a 2011 Facebook post.
Drummond has also shared that the dislike of bananas runs in her family — her father and one of her brothers aren't fond of them either. The chef's mom is an exception to this, however. She has her own recipe for banana bread. Drummond admitted that she even enjoyed a few slices of the fruit bread slathered with butter — and she goes through a lot of butter — but that it was a testimony to her mother's recipe rather than a banana epiphany.
She shared the banana bread recipe on her website but noted in the post that "if [bananas] disappeared from the earth forever, I wouldn't mourn their passing." Later, she confirmed that this was a one-time event and that she hadn't eaten banana bread since. She even theorized that the end of a low-carb diet was what led her to devour the bread.
Drummond doesn't even like serving bananas to customers
Despite her rare exceptions, Drummond avoids working with bananas as often as possible. In her bananas foster post, she said, "I seriously can't believe I'm doing this." At The Pioneer Woman Mercantile in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, Drummond's deli and bakery, you'll never find bananas in any menu items. "There's not a singular banana in the whole joint," Drummond said in an interview with Fox News.
That doesn't stop customers from enquiring about fruity desserts, though. Drummond added that when her customers request a banana cream pie, "the answer is always no." There is one exception, however: Drummond's ice cream parlor, Charlie's Sweet Shop, lists a banana split on its menu for customers to order.
While you're unlikely to ever find a plethora of banana-focused recipes on Drummond's website, there are a few exceptions. It seems that her dislike of the fruit won't stop her from giving her fans the banana-flavored desserts that they're craving — even if it's only an occasional treat.