Grilled bananas

10 best ways to make a sweet and fruity grilled dessert on your tabletop grill

I felt like a total noob when I saw my buddy toss a bunch of bananas on the grill a few nights ago. He cut a slit into each one and stuffed them with chocolate chips. He said he'd always done that growing up in South Africa.

Wow. Exotic South African grilled bananas with chocolate chips.

Except, it turns out that this isn't a new thing or even a very foreign thing. Everyone has been doing this everywhere except Antarctica and everyone knew about it except me. In fact, grilling bananas with only chocolate, while delicious, is pretty rookie stuff. Grilled bananas were made to be topped with other delicious things.

Right on the grill, no foil, no cover.

When the banana flesh was simmering, we added some Trader Joe's chocolate.

It doesn't look like much, but it tastes like groceries. We had this with peanut butter ice cream, but that picture was worse. Trust us, grilled bananas are awesome.

The best thing about grilling these bananas on the tabletop grill on your coffee table is that you have easy access to ice cream straight from the fridge. So you finish your kebabs, put the bananas on the grill, pour yourself some wine or fix a cup of coffee, and when the bananas are done, you scrape the hot, sticky, sugary flesh into a bowl and top it with your favorite ice cream. Make a real sundae of it with chocolate syrup, sprinkles, tiny candies, cut fruit, whatever.

Here's our review of the Livart electrip tabletop grill that we use for all sorts of tabletop grillin' and chillin'.

Here are some things you might need for grilling dessert on the tabletop grill:

Visit The Tabletop Tool Shop or The Tabletop Food Shop for everything and anything you might need for an excellent tabletop cooking experience.

Here are the 10 best grilled banana ideas on the internet.

#6 might be THE recipe for making friends and influencing people.

1. After a dinner of skewers, you can have your dessert on a stick, too. All Kebabs Recipes' grilled banana kebabs calls for sprinkling sugar and cinnamon on your barely-ripe bananas before grilling them. There's also a recipe for an easy chocolate sauce to top them off.

2. Put all the fruit on a stick! This is another dessert kebab, but you can use slices of all your favorite fruits and berries, including bananas, to make these Grilled Fruit Kebabs with a White Chocolate Drizzle.

3. Food and Wine has a pretty involved Grilled Banana Splits recipe that calls for soaking the bananas in a rum mixture for four hours before coating them with Turbinado sugar and grilling them for a crispy, caramelized shell. Serve them with three scoops of ice cream and a mocha sauce for a very adult banana split.

4. This 10-Minute Grilled Banana Boat recipe from Country Cleaver calls for chocolate, marshmallows and graham crackers for a funky twist on s'mores. You can also add berries, nuts, or whatever else you can think of.

5. Invite us over when you make these Grilled Rocky Road Banana Splits with peanuts, marshmallows, and chocolate. It's how bananas are done.

6. It will come as a surprise that this recipe for Chocolate Peanut Butter-Coated Grilled Bananas calls for wrapping the sweet bananas in salty prosciutto before grilling them. However, you can't argue with results and this looks amazing. This recipe is definitely on our to-do list.

7. Quick Maple Grilled Bananas from Nadia Lim can be served for breakfast as well as dessert. Grill these bananas on your tabletop grill instead of in the oven. Top them with maple syrup and caramelized pecans. Nadia calls for a dollop of healthy yogurt, but if we're having these for dessert, we're pulling out the Ben & Jerry's.

8. Oh, look! Grilled Bananas AND Pineapple (slices) with a Rum-Molasses Glaze. You don't have to reduce or caramelize the sugar in this sauce, so this is a fast and delicious way to impress your guests with your grill skills.

9. Technically, Thai Grilled Sweet Sticky Rice with Banana Filling isn't a "grilled banana" recipe, but it is a grilled dessert recipe that has bananas in it, so I'm keeping it on the list. Now, if you haven't cooked with sticky rice or banana leaves before, this recipe for might seem kind of daunting, but it's no harder than wrapping anything in a tortilla. Leela Punyaratabandhu from SheSimmers has expert advice and lots of helpful pictures to get you from not having any sticky rice for dessert to having some sticky rice for dessert.

10. I couldn't make this Grilled Bananas Foster recipe on our little electric grill that we use for just about errything, but this would be a perfect dessert for our raclette grill with the cast-iron cooktop (so long as it's wiped clean after the main course). Those grill marks are a sure sign of sweet, intense flavor.

What's your favorite grilled fruit or grilled dessert recipe? Let us know in the comments below!

If you like this recipe, check out some of our other tabletop-grilling ideas: