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Oct 15, 2024

Kitchen gadgets review: Banana Surprise Yumstation – an insult to God | Food | The Guardian

Does anyone need a machine that lets you burrow a hole through a banana so you can pump it full of bespoke filling? Banana Surprise Yum Station (coolshop.co.uk, £18.99). Fruit secured in a cradle is

Does anyone need a machine that lets you burrow a hole through a banana so you can pump it full of bespoke filling?

Banana Surprise Yum Station (coolshop.co.uk, £18.99). Fruit secured in a cradle is hollowed by an annular cannula, with fillings injected via pipette.

Bananas aren’t stupid enough.

This week, a machine that lets you impregnate a banana – and this sentence is the least worst thing about it. To clarify, it burrows a hole through one, so you can pump it full of bespoke filling like you’ve always wanted. Mmmm. As with the best products, I can’t figure out its name: Banana Surprise? Banana Yumstation? They’re both Yewtree-alerting internet search terms, so it doesn’t matter. With its selection of catheters, the set resembles My First Urology Kit and is immediately harrowing to use.

To begin, I snip the tip and secure my fruit within a flange. The instructions don’t help. It’s hard to hear “put banana in the Yumstation”. Is this an adult episode of In the Night Garden, where Igglepiggle and Upsy Daisy get jiggy in the Pinky Ponk? I slide a tube inside the fruit, extracting it full of flesh. (“Put thumb over hole of tool before pulling,” says the booklet. I read the same advice in Cosmo as a curious teen.)

The instructions suggest filling the well with fruit, which is taking the pith. Other ideas include toffee, syrups or cream. So … why does the box have a picture of a banana overflowing with what looks like blood? The child hoisting her Bobbitt-ed herb aloft is a chilling image. It makes your blood run banana.

Reluctantly, I load the filling bottle with strawberry jam and pump it through a teat. I’m not sure how well I’m expecting any of this to turn out, but the result is not good. When I peel my banana, there is subcutaneous haemorrhaging. (Again: not a sentence I want on my medical record.) This happens time and time again, jam weeping everywhere. It’s impossible to accurately feed the curved tube through the fruit unseen without it poking out the side. Horrific. There are no winners. Poor bananas, already the buffoons of the fruit world without these Frankensteinian torments. This circumcision-slash-botched-injection set is aimed at kids, but only ones who need a distraction from torturing cats. The carpet and my mental health are both irreparably stained. It’s a banana surprise! Hahahaha!

‘Bananas never tasted so good!’ the box says. Which is kind of an insult to God.

There will be blood. 0/5