banana cream pie

Banana cream pie with wooden chopsticks?

Lemme explain.

Banana cream pie is a very nostalgic taste for me. I’ve grown up with that red Baker’s Square box flashing that cream-topped, almond-sliver-sprinkled beauty to me through its plastic window for years. That box acted as both present and storage container for the first and leftover slices that splayed its banana,custard,cream layers diagonally as the piece next to it disappeared. And almost every time I’ve eaten the pie, I’d eaten it with a metal fork.

And it just tasted off. Every. Time. And if I have to point to a culprit to the crime, the suspect for murdered taste, it HAS to be the metal fork. Because what the hell could ever be wrong with a banana cream pie? The beautiful cream? The crunchy almond slices? The CUSTARD? THE BANANAS?

No. It’s gotta be an outside factor.

Whenever I used a metal fork with any other dish like pasta or whatever other dish that necessitated a fork in a chopstick household, I was fine. Albeit using a utensil that was way too heavy in my mouth, I discerned that the affect on taste was undetectable EXCEPT when it came to this pie.

Something tasted sour. Acidic. And the metal fork defined that taste because it would be sourly metallic.

The first thing to know is that almost all elements of a banana cream pie is acidic. Milk is slightly acidic and according to Dairy Food Safety Victoria, it has a pH value between 6.7 and 6.9. Moreover, bananas themselves have a pH range of 4.50-5.20. I Googled whether the acids of food interact with metal utensils, and sure enough, I found the Financial Times article “Spoon fed: how cutlery affects your food” which explains that, yes, they do. My stainless steel fork did have “a faintly metallic flavour that is normally overlooked,” and it didn’t come as a surprise to find out that the weird intermingling of the metal and the pie was because “the acid strips off a little of the surface.”

One Thursday, my dad texted me and my sister in our group chat asking if we wanted banana cream pie, and for the first time in years, I beheld the image of that red box again. Although this time, I had some Pavlovian sourness overcome me when I went to retrieve forks. So instead, I reached for the wooden chopsticks to eat my pie with (my family still used forks), which felt very odd against my functional fixedness. Not gonna lie, I missed my fork.

But to my surprise, the chopsticks lent a clean sweetness to the cream, untainted and actually pronouncing the sugar. To have such a bright and playful taste was so new to me that I’d pick wooden chopsticks over a metal fork any day.

So when it comes to acidic foods, try to use wooden utensils, or any material that won’t ruin your experience of the food. I haven’t looked too much into what type of cutlery is best when it comes to tasting your food, but wooden utensils have always been my trusty companion that hasn’t really failed me. Using the cheap takeout chopsticks do have this weird, sponginess to it, so I’d invest in some nice wooden spoons, forks, and chopsticks for when you taste things. I also like using plastic when it comes to ice cream or something like pie, but plastic isn’t very sustainable and healthy for the environment, so¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Also my dad stopped me from grabbing a plastic fork because of microplastic ingestion that comes with using plastic utensils, which is why I went for the wooden chopsticks instead.

Although if you can, try to keep the fork in the picture when you eat pie. There’s something ritualistic and comforting about eating pie with a fork. I watched my dad with one arm propped onto the mahogany dining table as the side of his fork cut into the soft layers of the cream and the banana and the crust. Seeing him so comfortably positioned, sliding the three layers with one fell swoop of his fork actually made me a little jealous. Yes, I was jealous of my dad over a fork. I know, I know.

It was a nice comforting revelation to taste another side of banana cream pie that I hadn’t experienced before, and I can’t wait for the many pies in my future that will thus be blessed with my wooden utensil.