Each time you peel a banana and eliminate the pores and skin, you are throwing away a tasty, nutritious snack.
A latest examine has proven if banana peels are blanched, dried, and floor right into a flour, they are often became baked items that style simply as good, if not higher than wheat-based merchandise.
Until you are a faithful reader of vegan cooking blogs or a Nigella Lawson fan, you have in all probability by no means thought of cooking with a banana peel. However not solely is it completely protected, scientists additionally demonstrated it actually is sweet for you.
When the experiment’s merchandise had been taste-tested, shoppers reported they had been simply as pleased with the flavors as they had been with peel-free sugar cookies.
You may even get a beneficiant serving to of minerals and cancer-fighting vitamins. Enriched with banana peels, for example, the sugar cookies made within the examine contained way more fiber, magnesium, potassium, and antioxidant compounds.
On the draw back, including an excessive amount of banana peel flour did end in cookies that had been considerably brown and arduous, probably 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 stability.
As a bonus, the products additionally saved effectively on the shelf for 3 months at room temperature.
Whereas the examine solely seemed on the penalties of including banana peels to baked cookies, the outcomes recommend utilizing banana peel flour in breads, truffles, and pasta may additionally be price contemplating.
Final 12 months, for example, a examine 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 as much as 10 p.c 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 concept of banana peel bacon and pulled peel ‘pork’.
Consuming the pores and skin of this fruit is not only a wholesome choice, it will probably 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 just 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 probably even lengthen 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 discovered to spice up a cake’s antioxidant properties and enhance its taste.
So the subsequent time you strip down a banana for the fruit inside, take into account conserving the pores and skin. Your stomach would possibly thanks later.
The examine was revealed in ACS Meals Science & Expertise,
A model of this text was first revealed in August 2022.
