Analysis: How to ignore the banoffee if it’s everywhere?

For historical reasons, England became famous for its cuisine capable of ruthlessly destroying the wonderful ingredients that nature gave it. It’s true that in the last 30 years several of its chefs, some of them very good ones, have been trying to correct this fate, but even so, when I heard about a dessert created by the English 50 years ago, I was always left with a fork behind.

But now that banoffee is everywhere; how to ignore its existence (as I had been trying, until I was scheduled to write this article)? It’s about to become the banana split of this generation, so better face the beast. Even more so, in 2021, banophiles celebrate the 50th anniversary of their object of desire.

According to British sources, it was right there (with date and place) that the candy was created — in 1971, by Nigel Mackenzie, owner of The Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, East Sussex, and his chef Ian Dowding.

It would have been inspired by the dessert of an American bakery (the story only gets worse), Blum’s Bakery, in San Francisco. Only, in this one, there was no fruit; it was in England that it became what the Oxford dictionary, since 1997, describes as a “pie made with caramel, banana and cream”.

In American origins, the thing was called coffee toffee pie, caramel pie and coffee. In England, the banana gained and the contraction in the name, banana + caramel (toffee). The most common is to use dulce de leche, made in a can of condensed milk (the English breeder used to do this — no surprise).

Going through the offers in the city (there are hundreds!), I came across Nanica’s, which seems to be one of the best known, where the sweet has whipped cream (sprinkled with cocoa) and dulce de leche, in addition to the banana and biscuit dough underneath , a little heavy and very sweet.

I also wanted to try Lady Banoffee’s, by name and because it’s close to home, and which also has several versions—due to childhood pressure, I appealed to Nutella’s, this time with whipped cream baptized with powdered milk. Again a little heavy, the whipped cream (like the one above) is thick, not aerated.

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary, I also looked for a rejuvenated variation, reinterpreted by confectioner Rafael Protti. “I knew little about banoffee before. But we started doing it according to demand. We thought about its elements, did a couple of tests, and it worked,” he says.

In its Crime shop (which started to serve the sweet due to the huge demand) the banoffee has cocoa mass, a caramelized white chocolate ganache, and on top it takes an English vanilla cream with mascarpone.

It is more surprising and less obvious than the others (also more expensive, R$25 — the others, around R$15).

Still, they’re not my thing. If I was more a fan of desserts, and knew how to make them, I would probably use a very savory sable dough underneath, chop or slice thinly (and I would put less) the banana, to make it more discreet than the logs they use, I would cover it with a more vaporous cream — and sprinkled with coffee powder (or mixed with the drink, as in the original). It would be good. And ran aground on the shelf.

In the current format, its effect resembles the banana split that was indispensable to us in the phase that mixed munchies and post-adolescence. Times that are behind us. And they haven’t arrived yet for my son, who maybe that’s why he didn’t fall in love with the versions we proved either.