Skip to main content
Dessert

Fried Bananas

Fried bananas are sliced bananas fried in hot fat until browned, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 and serve

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

  2. Fry until they are browned, then remove and serve hot.

  3. For a dessert option, sprinkle with sugar instead of pepper and salt.

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
Starchy flesh softens and the outside browns in hot fat, giving a sweet, tender texture.
Fat for frying
Conducts heat quickly so the banana slices brown on the outside while staying soft inside.

The step that matters

Frying in smoking hot fat. If the fat is not hot enough, the slices absorb oil and turn greasy before they brown. Hot fat sears the surface quickly, forming a browned crust while the inside cooks through.

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.

You might also like

Banana FillingBanana Filling16 recipesBanana SherbetBanana Sherbet10 recipesBanana FloatBanana Float9 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes