Home » Latest » Healthy Eating » I Try Making The Vegan Banana Peel Pulled Pork Sandwich

I Try Making The Vegan Banana Peel Pulled Pork Sandwich

11

InfoSearched 81 0 Healthy Eating

9.1

SaveSavedRemoved 3

A BuzzFeed host convinces her coworkers they’re biting into real pulled pork — and it’s actually banana peels.

Goodful’s Merle O’Neal spent early April testing the recipe that had taken over vegan cooking forums and TikTok feeds alike: shredded banana peels, simmered and sauced until they pass for barbecue pulled pork. The trend traces back to vegan food blogger Melissa Copeland of The Stingy Vegan, whose March 2019 post proved the fibrous inner peel could mimic shredded meat texture almost exactly. By the time Merle got to it, YouTuber Julien Solomita had already put his own spin on the recipe on April 2, 2019, pulling in huge numbers and pushing the challenge further into the mainstream.

• The recipe originated with vegan blogger Melissa Copeland of The Stingy Vegan in March 2019, who discovered banana peels could replicate pulled pork’s fibrous texture.
• YouTuber Julien Solomita tested the same recipe on April 2, 2019, drawing a large audience and helping the trend spread beyond food blogs.
• Merle O’Neal served the finished sandwiches to unsuspecting BuzzFeed coworkers, revealing the banana peel ingredient only after they’d already taken a bite.

Scraping, Shredding, Simmering

The process starts with prep work that sounds more like produce trimming than cooking. Merle scraped out the inner white pith of the banana peels before shredding them into strands with a fork — the same motion you’d use to pull apart a slow-cooked pork shoulder. From there, the shredded peels went into a skillet with spices and barbecue sauce, simmering until the strands softened and took on that sticky, smoky coating that makes pulled pork sandwiches messy in the best way.

What makes the trick work is texture, not flavor mimicry through exotic ingredients. Banana peel fiber breaks down into long, chewy strands under heat, and once it’s coated in enough barbecue sauce, the sauce is doing most of the flavor lifting anyway — the same principle behind plenty of plant-based swaps covered in the ongoing conversation around vegan eating.

The Taste Test

The real payoff of Merle’s video is the reveal. She handed finished barbecue sandwiches to BuzzFeed coworkers without telling them what was in them, let them chew, react, and compliment the “pork,” then dropped the actual ingredient. The reactions — confusion sliding into disbelief — are the entire reason this recipe kept spreading across platforms in the first place.

They ate seasoned banana skins and asked for seconds before finding out what they were actually eating.

Recipe Sparks Intense Online Debate

Not everyone bought in. Copeland’s original March 2019 post split opinion online the moment it went viral — some cooks praised the zero-waste angle of using a part of the banana that almost always gets thrown out, while others insisted no amount of barbecue sauce turns peel into pork. That divide is part of why the recipe kept getting reposted and retested by creators like Solomita and, eventually, Goodful.

For anyone curious about swapping more everyday staples for plant-based versions, it’s worth pairing a stunt recipe like this with something more sustainable day to day — the kind of practical plant-forward eating outlined in everyday food guides built around real nutrition.

Whether the sandwich fools you the way it fooled Merle’s coworkers is beside the point — the fact that a fruit peel destined for the trash can pass for barbecue pork at all is what kept this recipe bouncing from Copeland’s blog to Solomita’s channel to Goodful’s kitchen in under a month.