As a parent, finding healthful snacks for your children is always a big challenge. Don’t succumb to feeding them sugary treats full of food coloring and other additives. Try this delicious recipe for banana pudding and it will spark your imagination for other things to try.
Is there anything you can’t make with bananas? One-ingredient banana ice cream was all the rage in the Paleo world for a while. All you did was peel and freeze the bananas and then toss them in a food processor. Bananas’ natural creaminess and sweetness made it a little hard to tell that it was dairy and sugar-free—just frozen pureed bananas.
I’ve made a darn tasty banana, avocado and chocolate pudding sweetened with just a little maple. It’s just one banana, one avocado and a bit of cocoa powder and sugar to taste. Process in a food processor and it’s really close to a dairy version of chocolate pudding.
Inspired by those successes, what about a probiotic version? I found a number of fermented banana recipes, each just using sliced bananas in a brine. Perhaps I’ll try that eventually, but I wasn’t looking for salty sweet. To get my kids hooked, I wanted creamy pudding.
That idea got put on the back burner and the bananas sat on the counter turning brown—as so often happens in my house. Time for banana bread! I started making my recipe for maple sweetened banana bread and realized that I could make a creamy probiotic banana pudding with the very beginnings of my homemade banana bread.
My recipe for probiotic banana pudding includes three well-mashed bananas along with two tablespoons of full-fat sour cream. I added the sour cream to the bananas but skipped adding the eggs, oil, and maple for now. I left the mashed bananas and sour cream on the counter overnight and in the morning I pulled off a quarter pint jar of creamy probiotic banana pudding.
How to Make Quick Probiotic Banana Pudding Cups for Back to School
At this point, I could go either way. I could pack the whole lot into cups and put them into the refrigerator or I could go ahead and actually finish making banana bread with my pre-fermented bananas.
With sour cream as a starter, my “pudding” was so rich and creamy it was almost a bit over the top. While your kids may go nuts for it, you may want to use full-fat yogurt or low-fat sour cream for a more moderate cup. Or just go whole hog and enjoy the full-fat deliciousness without reservation. Dairy cream is delicious, we won’t judge!
To make for lunches I’d mash the bananas with sour cream the night before and then leave it out on the counter. By lunchtime the next day it’d be just a bit probiotic and deliciously creamy.
f you’re looking for a dairy-free option, try making a bit of cashew cream by pureeing soaked cashews and adding that into the mashed bananas along with a probiotic capsule.
The ratio in my pudding is three bananas (about 1.5 cups mashed) to two tablespoons of sour cream. The same ratio would be tasty using cashew cream, coconut milk yogurt or almond milk yogurt—which all provide a dairy free option.
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If you like this recipe, you might try these others from the Fermentools website:
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Ashley is an off-grid homesteader in central Vermont. She is passionate about fermentation, charcuterie, and foraging. Read more about her adventures at PracticalSelfReliance.com.