Organic dried banana — soft, dark and chewy slices, with the water taken out and nothing added.
Not banana chips — this is the important distinction
The two are constantly confused and they are entirely different foods.
Banana chips are crisp, pale and thin. They are fried, usually in coconut oil, and usually sweetened as well. They are a fried snack: often 30% fat or more, and closer nutritionally to a crisp than to a piece of fruit.
Dried banana — this — is simply banana with the water removed. Soft and chewy rather than crisp, dark brown rather than pale, and containing no added fat at all. It is fruit.
If a packet of banana is crisp and light-coloured, it has been fried. If it is dark and chewy, it has been dried. The colour and the texture tell you everything.
Why it is so dark
Banana browns as it dries — the same enzymatic browning that turns a cut banana grey in a lunchbox. Commercial producers prevent it with sulphur dioxide (E220), which is not permitted in organic production. So the deep brown colour is the mark of unsulphured fruit, and the flavour is correspondingly concentrated: intensely, almost fudgily banana, quite unlike the fresh fruit.
Using it
As a snack, chopped into porridge, granola or a lunchbox, in a trail mix with peanuts and dark chocolate, or blitzed into a smoothie where it thickens as well as sweetens. It also makes very good banana bread — soak it first, then mash.
Honestly, on sugar and teeth
Drying concentrates sugar four- to fivefold by weight, and dried banana is among the stickiest of all dried fruits, so it clings to teeth — which dentists mind more than the sugar itself. Eat it with a meal rather than grazing, and a portion is about 30 g.
treatfuls
treatfuls
treatfuls
