Playing with plantains

by Nick Vagnoni, Posted Aug 7th 2006 @ 5:31PM

David Blaine at From The Back Kitchen recently posted about his experiments trying to develop new menu items around plantains. Faced with nearly 50 pounds, I guess he had plenty of chances to explore. Blaine says he tried grilling and roasting plantains both with and without the skin. From the photos, it looks like most of the plantains were cooked when they were still quite starchy. Unlike bananas, plantains can and should still be eaten when their skins are completely black. My standby method is peeling them with a knife, slicing them on a bias into half- to quarter- inch thick slices and shallow frying them in either butter or vegetable oil. A good dose of kosher salt and cracked pepper finishes them off. A little hot sauce never hurt them either.

Filed Under: On the Blogs, Ingredients
Tags: black, fruit, frying, grilling, how to tell, HowToTell, peeling, plantains, ripe, roasting, to tell, when

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-07-2006 @7:30PM jmchez said... "Unlike bananas, plantains can and should still be eaten when their skins are completely black."

Good God! You've just made a million caribbean women, including my mother, drop their cast iron frying pans. That's not how you make GREEN plantain "tostones"! That's how you make a RIPE plantain dessert dish.

Both Sarah Moulton and Alton Brown demonstrated good "tostones" technique on their shows. For the record, I lke Alton's technique, it gives you a more "like it was dipped in batter, yet it wasn't" texture. He dips the plantain medallions in garlic salt water before refrying them.

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8-07-2006 @8:46PM Steve said... I agree, what are you Americans doing to your food, frying plantains that are too ripe? That's crazy.

I fry green plantains in plenty of oil (so they aren't dry afterwards) with a bit of salt. The ripe stuff I can't eat fried, they're too sweet by then; you'd have to make some kind of dessert with them.

Another reason why I don't eat ripe plantains is that they're usually extremely moldy. If they aren't, the moldy parts have been liberally cut off.
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8-08-2006 @7:47AM Bebop said... jmchez- i dropped to the floor when i read that sentence. By the way when you cook them ripe it's called Maduros, and I'm not really sure you're supposed to put salt on them (i mean people do it) but they're meant to be sweet. Serve them as a side dish to dinner. I like tostones better though.
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8-08-2006 @8:31AM Nick said... Growing up in Florida, most of the Cuban restaurants I ate at served maduros as a side to their dinner meals. They are quite sweet and in some cases fried so that the sugars carmelize and even get a little crunchy. The method I've come up with at home is to recreate what I used to get in restaurants as a kid.
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