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Dessert

Fried Bananas

Fried bananas are sliced bananas fried in fat, seasoned with salt, pepper, and optionally sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and pepper work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 483 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Fried Bananas

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel the bananas and cut them into half-inch slices.

  2. Heat the cooking fat in a frying pan until smoking hot.

  3. Add the banana slices to the hot fat and brown them quickly.

  4. Dust with salt and pepper, or sugar if serving for dessert, and serve hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Banana + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together483 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Provide the main body and natural sugars that caramelise and brown in the hot fat.
Cooking fat
Conducts heat quickly to brown the banana surfaces and carries flavour into the fruit.

The step that matters

Brown the bananas quickly in very hot fat. If the fat is not smoking hot, the slices absorb oil and go soggy instead of searing. Brief, high heat browns the sugars on the surface while the inside stays soft.

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, sugar):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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