Home › The World's Kitchen › Banana Fritters
Banana Fritters
Prepare a batter for fritters.
Cut six peeled, sound bananas in two crosswise pieces, roll them in the batter, then plunge in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, turning with a skimmer once in a while; lift up, thoroughly drain on a towel and neatly trim all around. Pour a Sabayon sauce on a hot dish, place the bananas over, dredge a little powdered sugar on top and serve.
The recipe assumes you already have two things on hand: a frying batter and a sabayon sauce. Neither is given here, and the frying time is the one number to ignore.
- Ten minutes is far too longBananas in batter need 2 to 3 minutes total, until the coating is deep gold. Held that long the fruit breaks down inside its coating and the crust scorches.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat at frying heat, roughly 360-375F. Below that the batter drinks oil, above it the outside colours before the fruit warms through.
- The batterA plain fritter batter of about 1 cup flour, 1 egg, a pinch of salt and enough milk or beer to make a coating the thickness of heavy cream. Let it rest 20 minutes so it clings instead of sliding off the slick cut faces.
- Sabayon sauceThe French spelling of zabaglione: egg yolks, sugar and a fortified wine such as Marsala or sherry whisked over barely simmering water until thick and foamy. Make it last, as it falls within minutes of leaving the heat.
- Choosing the bananas"Sound" means unblemished and free of bruising or rot. Firm, just-ripe fruit holds a coating best; fully spotted fruit tends to collapse in the fat.
- Skimmer and drainingA spider or slotted spoon does the same work. Drain on paper or a rack rather than a towel, which traps steam and softens the crust.
- TrimmingThe "neatly trim all around" step means cutting away the ragged fringes of fried batter with scissors or a knife, a hotel-kitchen nicety rather than a necessity.
- YieldTwelve pieces, serving four to six as a dessert. Fry in two batches so the fat does not drop in temperature.
Banana fritters belong to the moment when the banana stopped being a curiosity and became grocery-shop produce. Fast steamer passage and the growth of the Central American fruit trade in the last decades of the nineteenth century put cheap bananas into American and European cities for the first time, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s put them everywhere: in salads, in ices, in fritters. The treatment here is thoroughly French in method rather than tropical, a batter-fried entremets finished with sabayon and a dusting of sugar. A new ingredient is set inside the classical repertoire, so an imported fruit arrives at the table dressed as a Parisian sweet course.