Each time you peel a banana and get rid of the pores and skin, you are throwing away a tasty, nutritious snack.
A recent study has proven if banana peels are blanched, dried, and floor right into a flour, they are often become baked items that style simply as good, if not higher than wheat-based merchandise.
Except you are a faithful reader of vegan cooking blogs or a Nigella Lawson fan, you’ve got in all probability by no means thought-about cooking with a banana peel. However not solely is it completely protected, however scientists additionally demonstrated it actually is nice for you.
When their experiment’s merchandise had been taste-tested, customers reported they had been simply as pleased with the flavors as they had been with peel-free sugar cookies.
You will even get a beneficiant serving to of minerals and cancer-fighting vitamins. Enriched with banana peels, as an example, the sugar cookies made within the examine contained far more fiber, magnesium, potassium, and antioxidant compounds.
On the draw back, including an excessive amount of banana peel flour did lead to cookies that had been considerably brown and onerous, presumably from all the additional fiber. However when batches had been made with flour containing 7.5 p.c banana peel, the feel of the cookies hit a much more interesting steadiness.
As a bonus, the products additionally saved effectively on the shelf for 3 months at room temperature.
Whereas the examine solely appeared on the penalties of including banana peels to baked cookies, the outcomes counsel utilizing banana peel flour in breads, truffles, and pasta may also be price contemplating.
Final yr, as an example, a study on banana peel cake discovered the yellow pores and skin of the fruit offers a pure meals coloration to the baked product in addition to a dietary increase.
A 2016 examine, in the meantime, discovered that substituting up to 10 percent of wheat flour with banana peel flour can enrich baked bread with increased protein, carbohydrate, and fats contents.
Not into baking? Nigella Lawson has used banana peels in curry, and vegan bloggers have lately popularized the thought of banana peel bacon and pulled peel ‘pork’.
Consuming the pores and skin of this fruit is not only a wholesome choice, it might assist cut back meals waste. Round 40 p.c of a banana’s weight is in its peel, and more often than not, this nutrition-packed pores and skin is solely thrown away.
Positive, banana peels are fairly ineffective when uncooked. But when they’re ready proper, they’ll really style fairly darn good. They will presumably even prolong the shelf lifetime of some merchandise because the peels have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties.
The identical goes for different fruit peels, too, like mango pores and skin, which was additionally found to boost a cake’s antioxidant properties and improve its flavor.
So the subsequent time you strip down a banana for the fruit inside, think about holding the pores and skin. Your stomach would possibly thanks later.
The examine was revealed in ACS Food Science & Technology.
A model of this text was first revealed in August 2022.