Skip to main content
Dessert

Banana Fritters

Banana fritters are banana pieces coated in batter and fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Banana and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,134 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Banana Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skins from the bananas and cut them into quarters.

  2. Sprinkle the banana pieces with fruit sugar and lemon juice, then cover and let stand for 20 minutes.

  3. Drain the bananas thoroughly, then dip them in the fritter batter.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the bananas in deep fat until golden brown, then drain them.

  2. Sprinkle with additional fruit sugar and serve.

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 + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 sweetness of the fritter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and slows browning of the cut banana.
Fruit sugar
Sweetens the bananas and helps them caramelise slightly during frying.
Fritter batter
Forms a crisp, golden coating that seals in moisture during frying.

The step that matters

Draining the bananas before dipping. Surface moisture from the macerated bananas thins the batter and can make it slide off or fry greasy. Draining thoroughly lets the batter cling and crisp properly in the hot fat.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes