About a year ago now, Nashville-based chef and blogger Charles Hunter III (or @thesaltedtable) caught the attention of the masses with an interesting food hack. In an attention-grabbing Twitter thread, the chef shared that folks should not be tossing out their banana peels. Instead, they should be using them to make… wait for it… bacon.
Charles Hunter III wrote that his recipe will work for as many as two banana peels, but it can also be used on eggplant if you’d like to diversify your bacon even further.
And while the thread went live a while ago now, with the economic situation so many of us are in right now, we thought this nifty food hack may be a worthwhile revisit.
How to make banana peel bacon
To prep your peels, you need to scrape out all of the pulp, @thesaltedtable shared. From here, you want to set those babies in “a nice smoky marinade” for a couple of hours.
You can find @thesaltedtable’s recommended marinade recipe here.
His next tip was to start the frying process in a cold pan with avocado oil and cook away on medium-low heat until your banana peel bacon looks crispy and brown.
Hunter wrote:
“I cooked it over medium-low, and flipped it a couple of times to give the marinade a break, and to control the speed at which the sugars caramelized giving you that rich brown bacon colour. Have a pan, and wire rack ready. I would not put this on a paper towel.”
He explained that it’s best consumed after those sweet little nana strips have cooled. And while this is not true bacon, obviously, “it’s a ‘decent’ alternative, and I think it tastes great, and you wouldn’t know it was banana,” Hunter shared over Twitter.
The full guide to making these golden veggie bacon strips is available in the thread below. Be warned, they look damn delicious (if you ask me).
Banana Peel Bacon. A thread: pic.twitter.com/E1mNZ0hSbA
— Charles Hunter III (@thesaltedtable) March 14, 2021
My only remaining question is: would you give this a try?
This article has been updated since its original publish date.
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