Ingredient

Plantain

A plantain is not a banana you cook — it is a different fruit, starchier and firmer, and it is eaten as a staple rather than as a snack across West Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. The single most important thing to know is that its ripeness changes it completely: green, yellow and black plantains are three separate ingredients with three separate uses.

The three stages

Buy for the dish, not the other way round.

Green

Hard, starchy, barely sweet, almost like a potato. For frying twice into tostones or patacones, for boiling, for chips, and for fufu. Difficult to peel.

Yellow, with some black spots

The middle stage. Some sweetness, still firm enough to hold shape. Good fried in slices, good in stews, and the most generally useful.

Black, or mostly black

Very sweet, soft, and it caramelises beautifully. For maduros, dodo, and anything where you want sweetness and a dark, sticky exterior. The skin looks alarming and the fruit inside is at its best.

The mistake to avoid

Buying green plantains for a sweet fried dish, or black ones for tostones. Neither works, and the disappointment is usually blamed on the technique.

Peeling one

A green plantain will not peel like a banana and trying is how people give up on them.

1. Cut both ends off.
2. Score the skin lengthways, down the ridges, several times around the fruit — through the skin but not into the flesh.
3. Slide your thumb or the edge of a spoon under the skin at one of the scores and lever it away in sections.
4. For a very green one, soaking it in warm water for ten minutes first makes the skin come away far more willingly.
5. Ripe yellow and black plantains peel much more like bananas and need none of this.
6. Expect your hands to feel slightly sticky and tight afterwards from the sap of a green one. It washes off, and a little oil on your hands beforehand prevents it.

The dishes

• Tostones / patacones. Green plantain sliced thick, fried, squashed flat, and fried again. Crisp outside, dense inside, salted hot. Caribbean and Latin American, and a very good thing.
• Maduros. Ripe black plantain sliced on the diagonal and fried until dark and caramelised. Sweet, sticky, served with savoury food.
• Dodo. The West African version of fried ripe plantain, usually cubed or sliced, served with rice and stew.
• Plantain chips. Green plantain sliced paper-thin and deep-fried. Better than potato crisps and much easier to make than they look.
• Fufu and other swallows. Boiled green plantain pounded, sometimes with cassava, into a smooth dense dough eaten with soup.
• Mofongo. Puerto Rican — fried green plantain mashed with garlic, oil and crackling.
• Boiled or roasted, as a straightforward starch alongside a stew.
• In a stew, in chunks, where it holds its shape better than potato.

Buying and ripening

Plantains are usually sold green in British supermarkets and yellowing in African and Caribbean grocers. They ripen readily at room temperature, taking anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks depending on how green they started.

A paper bag speeds it up, and a paper bag with a banana or an apple in it speeds it up considerably more — both give off ethylene, which is what drives the ripening.

Do not refrigerate a green plantain you want to ripen; cold stalls the process and can leave the skin blackened while the flesh stays hard, which is the worst of both. Once it is at the stage you want, the fridge slows it down.

Black skin is not spoilage. A plantain is ready for the sweet dishes when the skin is largely or entirely black and the fruit gives to gentle pressure. Mould, a sour smell or leaking liquid is a different matter.

Common questions