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Dessert

Banana Fritters

A batter of flour, sugar, oil, water, and egg white is poured over sliced bananas and fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Banana Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour, sugar, salad oil, and warm water to make a smooth batter.

  2. Let the batter rest for 1 hour.

  3. Beat the egg white until frothy and fold it into the batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Split the bananas and cut each half into 2 or 3 pieces.

  2. Dip the banana pieces in the batter and fry in hot oil until golden.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + bananatop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,725 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + bananatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Forms the batter's structure, so the coating holds together around the banana.
Egg white
Whipped to froth and folded in, it lightens the batter and helps it puff.
Salad oil
Adds fat to the batter for a more tender coating, and fries the fritters.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the coating brown as it fries.
Bananas
Make up the filling, contributing sweetness and soft, moist texture inside the crisp coating.

The step that matters

Fry in hot oil until golden. If the oil is not hot enough, the batter absorbs more oil and turns greasy instead of crisp. Frying at a steady heat sets the coating quickly and browns it evenly.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, egg. 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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