Recipe makes banana peels taste like bacon

Would you try this?

Need to while away some socially-distanced hours? Check out this recipe for one of the strangest culinary inventions of our time: banana-peel bacon.

Food writer Claire Lower described her method in an installment of her Lifehacker column, Eating Trash With Claire. Charged with turning kitchen waste into edible treats, she took on banana peels with a formidable weapon — frying them in bacon grease.

Though she didn’t love the initial result, it set her on the right path. Frying the peels — which are indeed edible — helped eliminate their rubbery texture but left a bitter taste. Lower set to work gussying up the peels and eventually perfected a bacon-y crispness.

MORE: If raw fruits and vegetables make your mouth tingle, you might have this condition

Her final product eliminates the bacon grease in favor of vegan fats, like grapeseed oil. The cut-and-cleaned-out peels fry in the fat, then get a nice coating of a salty-sweet-spicy soy sauce glaze.

Once glazed, the peels take a couple turns in the oven to bake in the flavor and add crispness.

Lower says they probably wouldn’t substitute for real bacon on her breakfast plate, but they’re great for adding flavor to a sandwich, or as crumbles over a salad.

Home chefs have given the bizarro vegan bacon a try, too. Facebook user Scott Pilkington fried some up, added it to a sandwich and called it “decent.”

Over on Twitter, @ylileaart was a little hesitant, but thought the end product was good. Just “much sweeter than actual bacon”:

https://twitter.com/ylileaart/status/1254044059708071936?s=20

Also on Twitter, @derek_jankowski described it as “quite bacony,” despite some “banana notes”:

Banana peel bacon. Not too bad. Some banana notes at the end, but for the most part it’s quite bacony pic.twitter.com/j8D5lQSO5Z

— Wear a mask dangit! (@derek_jankowski) April 9, 2020

So today I learned you can eat banana peels!

A note of caution from Lower: If you have a latex allergy — which is often linked with banana allergy — you’ll probably want to skip this one.

She also used organic bananas when developing her banana-peel bacon. Many pesticides are used in conventional banana production, so that may be a wise choice as well.

Find the whole recipe here!