Many fancy Thai restaurants incorporate banana flowers into salads or other gourmet dishes, that relatively expensive.    I love the taste, so here my first experience of cooking banana flower, a.k.a. banana blossom.

This is how the banana flower/blossom grows in our garden when we lived in Koh Pha Ngan.

1. Cover your hands, knife, and cutting board with the cooking oil so they will not got stained.
2. Then peel off and discard the tough, old outer layers (called bracts) of the banana blossom.
   
   The colorful florets are eventually ‘soon to be bananas’need to be cleaned.
3. 
4. Remove the petals and hard stamen (it takes approximately 30 min to clean one banana blossom)
5. The leaves, that are in pale yellowish color, are edible and tender.Slice/chop them.
6. Immediately soak cleaned florets in acidic water (mix water with a juice of 3 lemons) for min 20 min

5.  Rinse in cold water, drain, squeeze – and you are ready to fry

Here is the final product – Asian pumpkin sprinkled with the fried banana flower.

How does the banana blossom taste? Taste like….something between an artichoke and bamboo shoots.

Here is a slide show of my first experience.

https://youtu.be/l5k7OFR1dYQ