The Common Fruit Ree Drummond Absolutely Loathes
Although she's known as a great home cook and lover of all things food, like anybody else, Ree Drummond has a few foods she doesn't enjoy, and there's one in particular that she's bee very vocal about hating: bananas. You'll find a few recipes including the fruit across the hundreds of recipes in "The Pioneer Woman" cookbooks, featured in the Food Network show of the same name, or on Drummond's website, but the celebrity chef won't eat them herself. In fact, Drummond says that she only adds banana recipes to her website for her readers, not for herself.
"I can't stand the taste, the texture," Drummond admitted in an episode of Southern Living's Biscuits and Jam podcast. "Most of the time, it's met with puzzlement and people are like, 'How could you not like bananas?' And my response, 'How could you like bananas?'"
Though fans have reportedly requested it through the years, Drummond still doesn't sell any banana products at The Mercantile, the bakery, restaurant, and store she owns in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. At her ice cream parlor Charlie's Sweet Shop, however, Drummond told Fox that she did get talked into putting a banana split on the menu.
Ree Drummond can sometimes tolerate bananas
Ree Drummond may find bananas repulsive, but at one point she did claim to enjoy them, at least if they were baked into banana bread. Back in 2009, she shared a banana bread recipe on her website along with the bold statement, "This brought me out of my banana-hating." But just two years later, Drummond backtracked on what she previously said, admitting that it was a one-time occurrence. "I'm certain it was because I had just finished a no-carb diet and had a skewed sense of taste," she wrote in a later blog post, "It had never happened before, and it hasn't happened since."
While her appetite for banana bread ended up being short-lived, Drummond eventually managed to come up with a Bananas Foster recipe she finds tolerable, but it sounds like the detestable yellow fruit got into her good graces with the help of some other ingredients. She says that the sugar, butter, cream, and dark rum, "helped soften the blow a little bit." Drummod's sweet tooth helped too; she only ended up tasting it because she paired it with ice cream.
It runs in the family
Despite her efforts to make bananas palatable, The Pioneer Woman still can't bring herself to eat bananas straight from the peel, as it always ends up with her spitting it out before she can even swallow. The reason for this, Drummond speculates, is that it's in her DNA. She writes in her blog that she didn't like bananas even as a baby and that her father and brother share the same distaste for them. Drummond's mother on the other hand has no issue with the fruit; in fact, the banana bread recipe on The Pioneer Woman website is actually hers.
Drummond's theory as it turns out may have some truth to it. A 2022 study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh found that food preferences can in fact be influenced by genetics. Similar to how some people have a gene that makes cilantro taste soapy, it's possible that an aversion to bananas really does run in Drummond's family. Either way, Drummond doesn't anticipate she'll ever acquire a taste for bananas. "I won't have any Dole sponsorships any time soon, let's put it that way," she concluded in the Southern Living podcast.