Girl peels biscuits from bananas

PUNE: They may seem as different as chalk and cheese but 20-year-old Rucha Joshi has made a delicious discovery - she makes biscuits from banana peels.

According to Rucha, her invention holds exclusivity as she herself has reviewed literature at the CFTRI from 1865 to 2007. Except for a jam made in European countries, so far, she has not come across any other product made from banana peels.

Bhagwat V Patil, president of the Banana Growers’ Association of India said that he had not come across any such product before. “My visit literally proved ‘fruitful’, and I decided to find out if one could make biscuits out of banana peel pulp,” she says. With encouragement from her family, she started work. She prepared three varieties of biscuits, one without banana peel pulp, the other with 10 per cent banana peel pulp and the third with 20 per banana peel pulp.

After conducting an analysis of the biscuits, she found that as she increased the amount of pulp, the calories in the biscuits decreased, while the fibre increased. Furthermore, after doing a fungal analysis, it was found that they had a good shelf life.

While she presented the first research paper on low-calorie biscuits from BPP in 2002, she kept improvising on the same. As a result, her paper was selected the fourth best in India at the ‘Council for Science and Industrial Research (CSIR) 2nd diamond jubilee invention awards for school children’ in 2003. CSIR has also filed a provisional patent for her invention in 2003. In 2007, after training at the Mysore-based Central Food Technological Research Institute, Rucha’s research paper was selected for the international conference on solid waste technology and management held in Philadelphia, US in 2007.

A third-year biotech engineering student at KIT college in Kolhapur, the commercial viability of the project has led some private food processing companies already showing interest in the product.