Think outside the banana
Considered a useless scrap by many home cooks, peels are edible and can be cooked into a range of dishes
In November, British cookbook author and food personality Nigella Lawson shocked her nation when she demonstrated a recipe from her latest cookbook, “Cook, Eat, Repeat,” on her BBC television show of the same name. It wasn’t royal family-level scandalous. Still, based on public reaction, you’d think she’d caused a major controversy.
And all because she’d prepared a fragrant dish of cauliflower — and banana peels.
“I certainly didn’t expect newspaper headlines about it!” she said in an email. “It’s hard to overcome the cultural assumptions about what is and is not edible, and to start eating what we have customarily regarded as waste.”
A few months earlier, another British culinary television star and cookbook author, Nadiya Hussain, had appeared on a “Good Morning Britain” segment on cooking during lockdown. “Everyone’s making banana bread,” she explained, offering resourceful tips on using scraps to avoid food waste. “Don’t chuck the peel away. Cook it up with some garlic and onions and barbecue sauce, stick it in a burger, and you’ve got, like, pulled pork, pulled chicken.”
After Lawson’s show aired, Hussain’s previous appearance resurfaced, and the peels became a culinary cause celebre. “Nigella Lawson shocks viewers with banana skin recipe,” read one Independent headline. “Are banana skins about to become a must-eat ingredient?” wondered the Guardian.
Hussain, whose parents are Bangladeshi, credits her father, a former chef and restaurant owner, for introducing her to cooked peels. In Bengali cuisine, unripe skins are cooked until soft, then pureed with garlic and green chiles, and sauteed with additional seasonings.
Banana skins have been trendy among vegans since at least 2019, when online recipes began circulating for treating the peels like bacon.
At around the same time, the pulled not-pork had its first brush with internet fame, courtesy of Canadian blogger Melissa Copeland, who published an explainer — and recipe — on her site the Stingy Vegan along with a video on Facebook. She’d developed it after learning that vegans in Venezuela use bananas’ outer jackets for an alternative to carne mechada (shredded beef ), and in Brazil a similar swap is popular in a dish known as carne louca (or “crazy meat”).
Copeland’s “pulled” peels “made it onto the menus of several restaurants in places as far away as Hawaii, Malta and New Zealand thanks to this recipe!” she wrote in an update to her original article a few months after posting it.
For American author Lindsay-Jean Hard, the appeal of cooking with banana peels extends beyond interests in veganism. She has spent the past 11 years learning as much as possible about utilizing the jettisoned parts of her produce.
Her 2018 cookbook “Cooking With Scraps” includes a recipe for her grandmother’s banana cake layered with brown sugar
frosting, and one notable change: She substituted the fruit with its peels, softening them with a simmer, then pureeing them with some of their cooking liquid. (She has subsequently realized that freezing them in advance takes care of the softening.)
She applies the same technique to banana bread, utilizing the whole fruit — casing and flesh — for “even more banana flavor.”
Hussain does a whole-banana loaf too. It’s a gooey, chocolaty “roller-coaster,” as her daughter described it on her mother’s Instagram story, where it debuted. She doesn’t trouble herself with tenderizing the peels; they yield during baking, resulting in a springy chewiness.
Now that Hard is a marketer at the Zingerman’s Bakehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she encouraged the bakery to put peels in all of the banana bread it produces and ships across the country.
It’s an “impact on a larger scale,” she said. “We compost a lot at the bakehouse, and composting is great, but it’s not as great as eating the food and not wasting it in the first place.”
Hard has received only praise for her banana cake. And of her curry, Lawson reported that the feedback from those who have actually made it has only been positive.
“I don’t think I’ve received one negative comment from anyone who’s cooked it themselves,” she said. “Some, certainly, said that they had doubts before they tasted it, but felt that they just had to try for themselves and were universally delighted.”
British food columnist Felicity Cloake was among them. “I had to try it because there wasn’t much promising going on at the time,” she said. “And it did blow my mind. I did like it.”
In truth, the flavor of the cooked skins isn’t too pronounced — it’s subtle, with a polite suggestion of bitterness and a slight floral note on the finish.
Lawson believes that “if you had to guess what the cut-up banana peels were, without knowing, you’d be much more likely to think them related to eggplant.” That’s how she uses them, in ratatouille as well as in this dish. She deploys a traditional method for preparing curry — frying a concentrated savory paste, then adding coconut milk to form a sauce.
Once the peels are tossed into the pan, Lawson marvels at how they “take on a luscious velvety texture.”
For those who remain unconvinced, she offered this last encouragement: “If you took a bite out of a raw potato, you’d never guess at the utter deliciousness of a french fry!” A few moments later, she followed up with a postscript: “I rather feel I should have added an expectation-managing sentence after comparing the cooked banana peels to fries though!”
No, they will never be fries. But they’re not scandalous, and yes, you can eat them.