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Dessert

Banana Croquettes

A fried banana dish formed into croquette shapes, coated in egg and cracker crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Banana Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the bananas and cut off the ends to shape them like croquettes. Season with salt and pepper.

  2. Roll each banana in beaten egg, then coat with cracker crumbs.

  3. Chill in the refrigerator for one hour to firm up.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat oil in a deep pan and fry the croquettes until golden brown.

  2. Serve hot as a side dish with chicken or lamb.

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 + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Pepper and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Small yellow bananas or plantains
Starchy flesh forms the soft, sweet filling inside the coating.
Egg
Beaten egg acts as a binder so the cracker crumbs stick to the fruit.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, browned outer crust when fried.
Cooking oil
Conducts heat to fry the coating golden and crisp.

The step that matters

Chill before frying. Chilling for one hour firms the banana and sets the egg and crumb coating so it holds its shape in hot oil instead of falling apart or soaking up grease.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, 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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