I’m in trouble. It’s fully chilly weather round the kitchen bench, complete with some gale-force sighs of disapproval. You see, I froze the elderly, blackening bananas without peeling them first – and this is not acceptable in our house.

I know it is a pain if you want to blitz the frozen banana to make vegan ice cream or whiz it with frozen mango to make a fluffy slushie that’s perfect drizzled with rum and lime. But, in my defence – and rest assured I wasn’t mounting one lest I got pinioned by an icy stare like a butterfly in a Edwardian lepidopterist’s collection – 98 percent of the time those bananas are going to become banana bread and you have to thaw them for that anyway.

I bring up bananas because banana bread is the food-waste minimising tip most often cited in issues such as this one. Now, while we can be smug about using the flesh, no one discusses the peel, which cavalierly hits the bin as we congratulate ourselves on saving the flesh from the same fate.

For a few years, I’ve been trying to solve the problem of how to save banana peels from the compost. It all started as a chat with chef Massimo Bottura in 2019. For his Refettorio charity lunch and waste-minimisation project in Milan, he had been baking banana peel under slices of pancetta to make it “bacony”, or “stranamente vicino alla pancetta ma non” (‘oddly close to bacon, but not’).

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Inspired by this and my food team’s work on ‘carrot bacon’, I scraped and fried the peels, then baked them loaded with spices and maple syrup. It was a hassle but a tastier, more convincing fake.

I posted a ‘How To’ video in April 2019 but by June I was over peel bacon. Even when banana peel bacon went viral on TikTok in 2021, I still knew there must be a better way to use the peels.

The light dawned when I opened Nigella Lawson’s new cookbook and found her banana skin curry. Sure, she got a wee bit lambasted for it but those trolls probably don’t even eat left-overs!

She wasn’t the first. The Great British Bake Off winner, Nadiya Hussain, got media heat for using banana skins in a dry South Indian curry and as vegan pulled pork back in 2019. Hussein’s parents are from Bangladesh and while there’s no record if that’s where her inspiration came from, dry banana skin curry has had a place on the subcontinent for a while. Cook Mamta Gupta also makes a dry curry, kacche kele ke chilke ki sabji, taught to her by her dad, using green banana skins.

So I suspect that a banana skin curry might just be the best way to use those banana skins that would usually just be binned… here’s mine, made with brinjal (eggplant).

Find the recipe for the brinjal and banana skin curry pictured above, here.

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