Yogurt Goes Bananas...

It’s a banana? It’s frozen yogurt? It’s both??

For a few months now, I’ve been faithfully practicing my frozen yogurt making abilities. I think I’m pretty good at it too.

Thankfully, I am in no way making actual frozen yogurt, but rather using a wonderful appliance called “Yonanas.” Get it? Yogurt and bananas, but it’s much more than a portmanteau.

This lovely machine turns a frozen banana into ice cream consistency. That’s right, it needs ONLY a banana. I had heard that whipping up this frozen fruit in a food processor would yield similar results but had never tried it. However, once I saw this machine, I knew it was for me.

Frozen bananas = ice cream!

I am an avid ice cream fan. While I am quite the healthy eater most of the time, I partake in the frozen treat at least twice a week. I don’t think that’s anything crazy, but I’ll gladly take any help I can get with my ice cream habit. Yonanas offers an incredible alternative to ice cream. Obviously, it only uses a banana, which starts me off in a much better direction than all the cream, sugar, and fat. The Yonanas machine whips up the frigid fruit into a wonderfully smooth and rich consistency and is the perfect base to add a few things to dress it up a bit.

The idea is to keep this as a more healthy option than ice cream, so I try to keep the mix-ins limited. I have settled into a routine of 1-1 ½ banana(s), a swirl of Santa Cruz Organic Chocolate Syrup, a healthy sprinkle of cinnamon, and a few dark chocolate chips. The chocolate syrup will quickly add all the sugar back in as if you still had a bowl of the decadent stuff, so be particularly careful with that one. Otherwise, this treat is an awesome answer to any ice cream fix.

I do have to say (and this may be obvious but I’ll say it anyway), you need to be a banana fan to get into this. While the marketing folks at Yonana claim that the treat will have a pretty neutral taste and only a hint of banana, there’s a lot of banana flavor going on in actuality. Otherwise, the only negative I’ve encountered with this appliance is having to “harvest” the “yogurt” from the various parts of the machine after it is done mixing. It only takes a few seconds to push the banana all the way down into the chute, but I remember thinking, “is anything going to come out?” I have to disassemble the parts (which has to be done for cleaning after every use anyway) and scrape out the yogurt - a bit of a pain, but not too terrible in the grand scheme.

An indulgence of Zwahlen's hot fudge!

While it has its inconveniences, I am very pleased overall with what this appliance has to offer. If you’re a fellow ice cream obsessor and fan of bananas, this thing is for you!