Breaded and Fried!

In Kentucky, bar food favorites are beer cheese and fried banana peppers and both are said to have had their start at Johnny Allman’s on the Kentucky River at Boonesboro.

Fried banana peppers are butterflied or halved mild yellow peppers, dipped in batter and fried until golden brown. Food historian Ronni Lundy, formerly of Louisville, has an idea about how they came about. “Here’s the deal with fried stuff in the South. If you eat it, somebody is going to fry it. At some point somebody said: ‘I bet that would be good breaded and fried.’”

Here’s how it’s done: Cut banana peppers lengthwise, and remove the seeds. Roll in plain flour, and then drop into a batter. To make the batter, mix an egg with sweet milk and plain flour to a consistency thinner than pancake batter. Deep fry until golden brown. To make them more pungent, marinate the peppers in vinegar.

“Though they sound simple enough, fried banana peppers require a deft hand, a good batter, and hot grease,” said John T. Edge, author of Southern Belly, the Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South.