It’s always a good idea to lessen your kitchen waste, whether that’s by using coffee grounds in the garden or using lemons to clean your home. But when it comes to banana peels, Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain suggests using them as an ingredient, rather than finding a non-food use for them.
While I guess I’ve always known that banana peels are edible, I’d never actually tried eating them myself—never mind cooking them into a curry. But that’s just what Nadiya’s recipe calls for. She first shared the recipe in her 2024 recipe book Cook Once, Eat Twice, and it was then re-shared on The Happy Foodie website.
Introducing the recipe, Nadiya wrote: “We have eaten banana peel our whole life, so we are in no way shocked or bamboozled by something like this.
“I know that is not normal for everyone, but if you are making banana bread or have kids like mine and go through bananas like they are going out of fashion, give this a try.
“It’s so easy and such a great way to use up something that pretty much everyone chucks away.”
While the recipe takes a while to cook and may not be a go-to choice for a quick mid-week meal, it was still pretty simple to make.
Nadiya starts the recipe with a quick hack to prevent the peels from browning too much before they go in the pan: sprinkling them with lemon juice. While my peels did still brown a bit, it was not as bad as it could have been without this tip.
The curry itself turned out surprisingly delicious, and will definitely be one I make again when I have leftover banana peels in the house.
Ingredients (serves 4)
- Peels of six bananas
- One lemon, juice only (Nadiya recommends filling the leftover lemon with bicarbonate of soda, popping this into a bowl and then placing it in the back of your fridge to capture any nasty fridge smells)
- Five tablespoons of oil
- Two onions, diced
- One-and-a-half teaspoons of salt
- Two tablespoons of ginger paste
- Two tablespoons of garlic paste
- One tomato, diced
- Two tablespoons of tomato purée
- Three tablespoons of garam masala
- Two teaspoons of chilli powder (optional)
- 300ml of water
- Chopped coriander, to serve
Method
Start by slicing the banana peels and squeezing the lemon juice over them.
Then pour the oil into a medium non-stick pan. Once hot, add the onions and salt and cook until brown. Once the onions have browned, add the ginger paste, garlic paste, tomato and tomato purée, cook for a few minutes and then add the garam masala and chilli powder and mix through.
Add the sliced banana peels and cook over high heat for a few minutes. Add the water and lower the heat. Leave to cook with the lid on for half an hour. Then take off the lid and cook now till the mixture is dry and not watery. Sprinkle over the coriander and serve.