Banani Cooking Studio – Today: Pulled Pork and Bacon from the Bowl
Taste the Waste, Leaf to Root, Nose to Tail, these buzzwords are becoming more and more familiar to us and are all reminders to waste less food or even use parts that we would have otherwise thoughtlessly thrown away.
We follow this trend and add Fruit to Peel: more precisely Banana to Peel. So, it should be about the culinary use of banana peels.
From our perspective of a packaging design agency, it’s all about cooking with packaging. Are we Bananas? Judge for yourself!
Let’s go Bananas
Eat an apple with peel? No issue but anyone who has had some banana peel in their mouth will be more skeptical about bananas. Yet, as we all know, many important nutrients are found there.
Banana pig
There’s something piggy about bananas. And some are convinced that banana peels are also very good for vegan pulled pork and vegan bacon. This has piqued our interest and we are testing both. So for us, bananas are pigs and must be pigs.
To implement this we wash, pluck and cut banana peels into 3 cm strips instead of throwing them away. We put the strips in a bowl and marinate them with olive oil, smoked paprika, chili flakes, mustard seeds, garlic powder, onion powder, cumin and BBQ sauce. We then let the marinade soak in for 10 minutes. We heat a pan and put the marinated shells. We braise the Pulled Banana over medium heat for about 10 minutes. Then we put them in a shallow bowl and let them cool.
Ready. This is much faster than pulled pork.
For example, this could be packaged in tin cans or jars like a confit, so you can enjoy some Pulled Banana anytime. Now for the second part, the Banana Bacon.
Banana Bacon
Basically, we proceed with the shells as we did with Pulled Banana. We peel the bananas and tear them into strips about 1.5 cm thick. We bake the banana strips in a pan with hot vegetable oil. It smells slightly sweet, the smell reminds us a little of baked bananas, which are served as a popular dessert in many Asian restaurants. We place the golden brown strips on kitchen paper to degrease. For the bacon flavor, we mix together a sauce: The marinade consists of soy sauce, maple syrup, brown sugar, garlic powder, sweet paprika powder and liquid smoke. We apply the thick marinade to the baked banana strips with a brush, then we put the strips on a cooling rack and put them in the oven at 160 degrees for 8 minutes. Here the marinade dries and caramelizes. The stripes get a dark color, in places they become a little black. We let the strips cool and taste: Crispy, lightly smoked with a hint of caramel.
So not bad at all.
Pulled Banana also has potential but not necessarily in direct comparison with Pulled Pork. Bacon is bacon, pig is pig and banana is banana. Substitute products are often just substitute products. For real meat lovers, our bacon is certainly not an alternative, but it is time to appreciate such dishes for what they are, because in the spirit of Taste the Waste, these recipes are absolutely “Real” and not “Fake” at all. So stay with us curious and open for new things. Maybe, like us, you’ll get hooked on interesting recipes that change our tastes.
If you still want something sweet at the end, you can finish the meal with a banana peel cake. And finish such a meal can be not only with a marc from grape skins also known as grappa, there are now also alcoholic beverages made from banana peels. Slightly dark banana peel actually develops a very interesting aroma, reminiscent of the aroma of rum or whiskey.
Who is now inspired can also try a banana peel curry and who is all too bananas, can simply polish shoes with the peel or see even crazier ideas in our Studio Banani.
Cooking with the packaging? That makes perfect sense to us, because we’re all about the connection between packaging and content:
Packaging design agency meets food lab
Food Lab? What does a packaging design agency have to do with the food laboratory? We want to deal with the core of the matter before designing the surface – i.e. the packaging. Only those who understand a food product can translate its taste into suitable packaging design. That’s why we have creative minds working on food in the kitchen long before it comes to packaging design.
