When you grab a batch of bright yellow bananas on your weekly trip to the grocery store, it’s only a matter of days before they go brown. While a common solution for overripe bananas is to make banana bread, another option is to freeze them, which offers many different ways to reuse your bananas — but it depends on how you do it.

You can freeze your bananas either sliced or whole, but either way, you’ll want to do so only once they’ve become slightly overripe with brown spots on their skins, which is when their flavor is most pronounced. You should only freeze your bananas whole if you’re making banana bread because you'll just mash the whole frozen bananas as you usually would.