Chemical Properties of Green Banana Flour

Bananas are native to tropical South and Southeast Asia, and thought to have first been domesticated in Papua New Guinea. Today, bananas are cultivated throughout the tropic in at least 107 countries, eaten generally as ripe fruit with high nutritional value. However, some stress conditions such as drought, flood, etc. can reduce maturation of banana bunch, resulting in early harvest of green stage bananas. Green bananas could potentially be made into flour for making products but more information is required about their nutritional content. Twenty three cultivars from the Banana Germplasm Bank at Sukhothai Horticultural Center were made into green banana flour and studied for their nutritional characteristics of at the Postharvest and Product Processing Research and Development Office, Bangkok in 2010. The flour was made by removing the peel, cutting the pulp into small pieces, drying until approximately 8% moisture content and then ground into flour. Protein, fat, carbohydrate, fiber, ash and viscosity of the flour were analyzed. The nutritional content of raw banana flour affects the quality of processing and storage life and was varied: protein (3.2-9.4%), fat (0.15-5.0%), fiber (1.6-5.0%), ash (1.7-5.8%) with only carbohydrate remaining consistent around 81.55% between the cultivars. Furthermore, gelatinized banana flour had high maximum viscosity about 778-1200 BU, except the cultivar 'Lep Mue Nang', which had low maximum viscosity and set back value of 500 and 141 BU, respectively.