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I Try Making The Vegan Banana Peel Pulled Pork Sandwich

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Banana peels are having a moment nobody saw coming, and BuzzFeed’s Goodful just put them to the ultimate test.

The recipe sounds like a joke until you actually watch someone pull it off: shredded banana skins, seasoned and sauced until they pass for pulled pork. In “I Try Making The Vegan Banana Peel Pulled Pork Sandwich,” Goodful tackles the viral trend that spread across YouTube and social media through March and April 2019, testing whether the fruit’s discarded skin can genuinely stand in for slow-cooked meat on a bun.

• The trend traces back to food blogger Melissa Copeland of The Stingy Vegan, whose March 12, 2019 recipe for banana peel pulled pork kicked off the wave of copycat videos.
• The technique calls for firm, barely ripe yellow bananas — peeled, scraped clean of the soft white pith, then shredded lengthwise with a fork into meat-like strips.
• The shreds are seasoned with smoked paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder, simmered in water and oil until tender, then tossed in vegan barbecue sauce and served on toasted buns with coleslaw.

Banana Skins Gain Viral Popularity

Copeland’s original post wasn’t chasing clout — it was a zero-waste cooking hack, built on the idea that a part of the fruit almost everyone throws in the trash could be repurposed into a sandwich filling. The claim that stuck with cooks online was simple: cooked down and shredded, banana peel takes on a stringy, chewy consistency that reads as meaty rather than fruity, and it happens to soak up barbecue sauce the way a sponge soaks up water.

That combination — sustainability angle plus a genuinely surprising texture swap — is exactly the kind of recipe that travels fast on YouTube and TikTok. Within weeks, food outlets and home cooks were duplicating the method, and Goodful’s version follows Copeland’s blueprint closely: firm bananas, careful peeling, pith scraped away, then a fork run down the skin to create shreds that hold together instead of turning to mush.

The Cook, Step by Step

The prep work is the whole trick. Barely ripe, still-yellow bananas hold their peel’s structure better than overripe ones, which is what allows the fork-shredding to produce long, fibrous strips instead of a slick paste. Once the white pith is scraped out, those strips get seasoned with smoked paprika, garlic powder, and onion powder before going into a pan with water and a little oil to soften.

From there it’s a straight barbecue build: the softened peel gets tossed in vegan BBQ sauce, piled onto a toasted bun, and topped with coleslaw for crunch. It’s the same assembly logic as any pulled-pork sandwich — sauce, bread, slaw — which is part of why the swap works on camera. Visually and structurally, it looks like the real thing before a single bite is taken.

Not Everyone Was Convinced

The trend didn’t win over every taste tester. Prominent internet creators like Julien Solomita posted skeptical reaction videos after altering the cooking steps, coming away unimpressed with the flavor and texture. That split — believers who found a genuine meat-adjacent chew versus skeptics who tasted bitterness and astringency — is what turned a niche vegan recipe into a full-blown internet debate rather than just another cooking clip.

Cooked banana peels act as a flavor sponge with an unexpectedly chewy, meaty consistency.

That description, echoed across food coverage of the trend, is the core selling point Goodful is putting to the test on camera — and it’s exactly the line that skeptics like Solomita pushed back on when their own attempts came out tasting more bitter than barbecue.

A Zero-Waste Pitch With Real Legs

Whatever side of the debate a viewer lands on, the recipe’s built-in hook is hard to argue with: it uses a part of the banana that almost always ends up in the compost bin. That angle is why food outlets kept framing the dish as an innovation in zero-waste cooking rather than just a gimmick, and it’s a big reason the recipe kept resurfacing on channels that don’t normally cover strict vegan content. Viewers curious about other unconventional food experiments and kitchen tests can find more of that territory under Cooking & Food Experiences, and for another creator’s plant-based kitchen adventure, there’s trying pinterest mug recipes.

Copeland’s recipe was barely three weeks old by the time Goodful’s version hit YouTube, and the disagreement it sparked — chewy triumph versus bitter letdown — is still playing out one reaction video at a time. Whether the banana peel earns a permanent spot next to jackfruit and seitan in the vegan pantry probably comes down to whoever posts the next side-by-side taste test.

Big Vegan Flavor: Techniques and 150 Recipes to Master Vegan Cooking - GOOD

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