rdavidson24: Home canner here. Yes, there is a chemical reason we don’t make all that much banana jam/jelly. Not by itself, anyway. Without getting into too much detail, there are two basic canning methods: water baths and pressure canning. Water baths basically just immerse jars in boiling water for a while, long enough so that the entire contents of the jar reach the boiling point. Pressure canning actually gets the temperature *much* higher, which you can accomplish with pressure vessels but not with regular pots.
Problem: water bath canning doesn’t work for all kinds of food. It only works with foods that have at least a certain level of acidity. Many fruits (including tomatoes) are high-acid, and so can be canned using a water bath. But pretty much all vegetables, not to mention meat, fish, and poultry, are all low acid. To safely can low-acid foods, you either need to use pressure canning or add something to the food to raise the acidity.
Example: the recipe linked by /u/onions_can_be_sweet includes lemon or lime juice. The citric acid in the juice should be enough to do the trick and permit water bath canning. But now it’s arguably not just “banana jam”. It’s “banana-lime jam” or “banana-lemon jam” or whatever.
So, why not just pressure can it? Well, two reasons. First, it is highly inadvisable to can *anything* that hasn’t been scientifically tested to be safe. And nobody has done the testing to figure out whether and if so under what conditions bananas are safe to pressure can. But second–and I’m going out on a limb a little on this one–it may simply be that bananas don’t take to the high temperatures of pressure canning all that well. Not everything does. The trick about the scientific testing is to find a minimum set of standard conditions that produce safe canned food *that people still want to eat*. Stick anything in a pressure canner for two hours and yeah, I can pretty much guarantee it’ll be safe to eat. But that doesn’t mean it’d be tasty. I have a sneaking suspicion that running bananas through a pressure canner long enough to ensure food safety would simultaneously render them highly distasteful, if not outright inedible.
For what it’s worth, this is why you don’t see much in the way of canned pumpkin or squash. It’s possible to do this commercially, but for the home canner, there’s no safe way of canning those foods that results in something anyone would want to eat. For those foods it has to do with how thick they are when you mash them. Proper canning depends upon liquid circulating throughout the jar to ensure uniform temperature and eliminating pockets where bacteria might hide. Squash puree is so thick (and squash lumps so solid) that that doesn’t happen. But unlike meats, which are perfectly edible even after extended periods of pressure canning (though they do take on a distinct “canned” flavor due to basically overcooking them), pumpkin/squash isn’t. No one has found any safe and reliable way to can them at home with an acceptable level of quality.
Much the same goes for dairy products. Just. Doesn’t. Work.
All of the above aside, there’s probably a more basic, historical reason we don’t see more canned bananas: they’re a relatively recent grocery item. Until the invention of refrigeration, it wasn’t really possible to export bananas from the Caribbean to the US. Not on any kind of commercial scale, anyway. So by the time bananas became staples in American grocery stores, refrigeration technology rendered home canning largely obsolete. It’s still done by a relatively small number of people as a hobby, but you don’t see large numbers of people depending on home canning as a major food source the way you did a century ago. So the period of time in which home canning was a widespread phenomenon (something like 1830 to 1950) and the period of time in which bananas were readily available in the US (maybe 1930 onward) don’t really overlap all that much. Certainly not long enough for a culture to have developed around canned bananas.
J-Roc_vodka: Jams and jellies didn’t come out of taste preference. They were invented so people could enjoy that fruit year round. Since Bananas are good all year people never preserved them, and therefore, never became a type of jam or jelly.
rockhoundlounge:
Should it be called bajama?
onions_can_be_sweet: Not sure who “we” is. I make a lot of jam, never made banana jam yet but I’ve found a number of recipes ([here’s one from some random mommy blog](https://confessionsofanover-workedmom.com/how-to-make-banana-jam/)). I will likely make some one day when I’m bored.
I agree you don’t see a lot of banana jam in stores, at least where I live (Canada). Maybe that’s because good bananas are available all year, they don’t seem to have a season, and jam making was traditionally a way to preserve fruit so that it doesn’t rot and can be enjoyed out-of-season.
I can’t think of any chemical or culinary reason why you don’t see a lot of banana jam.
Concise_Pirate: Bananas are, in many places, the very cheapest fruit by weight — and they ship well and are available all the time. So there’s just not much reason to preserve them in a jar.
MotherFuger: Not sure if it is a chemical or culinary reason, but my mom makes strawberry banana jam and we have to eat it before the others because it gets a weird consistency after about a year. It turns a darker color and gets watery. It still tastes the same though, its just the texture that changes.
EvenBraverLilToaster: I think it also has something to do with not being able to juice bananas easily. And since there’s little to no juice in bananas, you can’t really make a jam or jelly with them.
renegade87: The canning post pretty much hit it but I would say several years ago I tried canning for the first time and made a banana-pineapple jam or jelly not sure on the difference. It was great I did the boiling water to preserve it. We ate all but one jar, I left it in a cool closet and when we moved several years later that thing was dark brown so I’m guessing I did something wrong.
taylorschneider: Side question: What is the difference between Jam and Jelly?
coconut-telegraph: [Banana ketchup](https://www.google.com/search?q=banana+ketchup&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari) is a thing though.
How real mozzarella is made
Source
dahamentashenkid: I worked in a pasta centric restaurant while living in NY. We would hand stretch our mozzarella everyday using the curd and a hot water bath. It’s one of the most excruciatingly painful prep items I’ve ever had. But damn was that cheese delicious.
Dreeeeeb: My old boss from the pizzeria I used to work at made this a lot, he said that making fresh mozzarella a lot causes problems in your bones due to constantly switching from boiling hot water to freezing water and using a lot of finger strength in the process
farmch: Oh all I need is mozzarella to make mozzarella…
GhostZ28: Here’s the [source](https://youtu.be/pU_VoyWfLfY) for those wanting to watch.
lazylion_ca: Is the arm hair optional?
nobody_likes_soda: **JUST HOOK IT TO MY VEINS!**
Leo_TheLurker: I suddenly have the urge to be a cheese maker
Rat_Stick: That was sexy
noobplus: I thought Saddam was the only one who melted the Kurds
PornCommentsAreWeird: The last 3 seconds of this gif are delicious as fuck.
nycgirlfriend: I went to Naples in my early twenties while backpacking around Europe and an older friend I was with demanded I try a piece from the loaf of mozzarella sitting on the table. I never had a real passion for it being an American and all, but I gave in an took a piece anyway. And my goodness…that was the most incredible mozzarella I’ve ever had. I remember that day like it was the day I lost my mozzarella virginity. No mozzarella since has ever matched that. Real mozzarella when done right, is life changing.
MrHudshon: Please, I can only become so erect.
neodiogenes: Mozzarella: It’s not just for breakfast, lunch, dinner, afternoon tea, elevensies, post-dinner TV snack, and midnight munchies anymore.
mccplusplus: Please before say “EWWWWWW BARE HANDS HOW UNCLEAN”, every cheese worker MUST make the cheese without gloves because they must touch the curd to understand when is ready, obviously his hands are super-washed like the hands of a surgeon, and respecting the [HACCP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_analysis_and_critical_control_points) standards of food manipulation
Solterlun: I hate the words “To Taste”
I don’t know how it’s supposed to taste or what the right amount is to react well with everything in a good proportion. That’s why I’m using a recipe.
Give me an amount. I will tweak it from there in subsequent preparations.
aazav: The video was posted for this recently and it’s much better.
otto3210: Well hello curd nerds
NiceSasquatch: I was expecting more cow.
Phyre36: Are you trying to make me hungry? Cause it’s working.
hedinc1: Please put some of that on my 🍕
Phollie: I would choke to death on that gooey stretchy cheese and die happy.
sieve-fisted_find: ITT: Americans traumatized by preparing food with human hands when a huge part of their diet is chicken-shit-ridden deep-fried-in-cheap-oil fast food
Trumpeachment: What a cheesy guitar part
Actual1y: Oh, you like mozzarella? Name three of its albums.
jcro8829: I’m getting constipated just watching this.