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Dessert

Fried Bananas

Fried bananas are sliced bananas cooked in hot fat until golden, served hot with optional pepper, salt, or 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

Prepare

  1. Choose bananas that are not quite ripe and peel them.

Fry

  1. Slice the bananas and drop them into a frying pan with about ½ inch of smoking hot fat.

  2. Fry until golden brown, then remove and serve hot.

Season and serve

  1. Sprinkle with pepper and salt.

  2. Sprinkle with sugar instead.

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
Their starchy, sweet flesh softens inside and browns on the outside when fried.
Frying fat
Conducts heat quickly, browning the surface and crisping the slices without soaking them in oil.

The step that matters

Frying in smoking hot fat. Fat that is hot enough sears the slice surface quickly, creating a golden crust before the inside turns mushy. Cooler fat lets the banana absorb oil and become greasy and 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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