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Dessert

Baked Bananas

Baked bananas are ripe bananas baked until dark and soft, then sprinkled with sugar and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Baked Bananas

Why it works: Banana and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,102 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Baked Bananas

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Wipe the bananas and loosen one end of the skin.

  3. Place the bananas in a shallow pan and cover.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until the skins are very dark and the fruit is soft.

  2. Remove the bananas from their skins, sprinkle with sugar, 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas
Their starch softens and turns sweet and creamy as they bake in their skins.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cooked fruit taste rounder once it is sprinkled on.

The step that matters

Bake until the skins are very dark. Dark skins signal that the fruit inside has softened fully. Pulling the bananas too early leaves starch unconverted, so the flesh stays firm and less sweet.

“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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