Wondering what to do with banana chips? This guide covers how to pick them, cook them, store them, and swap them, plus 7 recipes to put them to work.

What are banana chips?

Banana chips are thin rounds of banana that have been dried or fried into a crunchy, shelf-stable snack. The familiar crisp, pale-gold chip you find in trail mix is almost always deep-fried, usually in coconut oil and dusted with sugar, which is why it shatters and tastes sweet and rich.

There is a second, quite different style: oven-dried or dehydrated banana, which is leathery and chewy rather than crisp, with no added oil or sugar.

The two get the same name but behave nothing alike, so it pays to know which you have.

Most fried chips are made from firmer, starchier cooking bananas rather than soft dessert ones, since a ripe sweet banana would simply fall apart in the oil. The result is concentrated banana flavor with a satisfying snap.

How to Use Banana Chips

Banana chips earn their keep as a crunchy, sweet add-in. They are a fixture in granola and trail mix, where their crunch and sweetness play off oats, nuts, and dried fruit.

Jim's Granola and Healthy Oat Granola both fold them in, and they bulk out a Rice Trail Mix or Granola Gorp by the handful.

They also work crushed. Broken into shards, they make a quick crunchy topping for yogurt or ice cream, and a coarse crush stands in for nuts on a frosted cake or in a snack bar like Fruit-Nut Nibbles.

A word on timing: stir crisp fried chips into anything wet at the last minute. They turn soft and lose their snap once they sit in milk or a baking batter, so they belong on top or in dry mixes, not simmered in.

For baking, the chewy dried style behaves more like a raisin and survives the oven better, while fried chips are best scattered over the finished item.

Halloween Popcorn Crunch tosses them into a sweet popcorn mix where the contrast in texture is the whole appeal.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Banana chips pair naturally with the flavors that already love banana: chocolate, peanut butter, honey, oats, coconut, cinnamon, and toasted nuts. The fried, coconut-oil kind leans tropical, so it sits happily alongside dried pineapple and shredded coconut.

The most common mistake is assuming all banana chips are a health food. The fried, sweetened kind is high in saturated fat from coconut oil and added sugar, closer to a candy than to fresh fruit, so check the label if that matters to you.

A second mistake is treating crisp chips like soft dried banana in a recipe. Drop fried chips into a batter or a wet cereal and they go limp and greasy.

If a recipe wants chewy banana, use dehydrated banana or fresh, not the crunchy chip.

The third is letting them go stale. Once the bag is open, the crisp ones soften fast in humid air, turning chewy and a little oily, which is fine to eat but not what you wanted.

Substitutes

What to swap depends on which style a recipe calls for. For crunch and sweetness in granola or trail mix, other dried fruit chips like apple or mango give a similar sweet, crisp bite, though without the banana flavor.

If you want the banana taste but the chip is missing, chopped soft dried banana or even a handful of banana-flavored cereal carries the flavor, accepting that you lose the crunch. In baking that calls for chewy dried banana, raisins or chopped dates substitute by texture and sweetness.

For a homemade version, you can dehydrate or low-oven-bake your own thin banana slices, brushed with lemon juice to slow browning. These come out chewy rather than fried-crisp, but they skip the added oil and sugar entirely.

Buying and Storing

Read the label before you buy, since "banana chips" covers both the fried sweetened crisp and the plain dried chewy kind. If you want the lighter option, look for dehydrated or freeze-dried banana with no added oil; if you want the classic crunch, the coconut-oil fried ones deliver it.

Choose chips that look pale gold and uniform, and avoid bags with lots of broken crumbs or a stale, rancid smell, a sign the oil has turned. Freshness matters most with the fried kind, where the oil eventually goes off.

Store banana chips in an airtight container in a cool, dark cupboard, where unopened they keep for many months.

Once opened, seal them tightly and keep them away from humidity, which is what turns a crisp chip soft. If they do go limp, a few minutes in a low oven can crisp them back up.

Quick facts

In Chinese

香蕉片

British (UK) term

Banana chips

en français

chips de banane

en español

chips de plátano

Recipes using banana chips

There are 7 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 7 recipes