For years I heard that though they look like bananas, plantains are quite different. You wouldn’t eat them raw, they aren’t like fruit, you’re supposed to fry them, etc etc. Well, I just tried one, and it seemed like a banana to me. It was more like a regular old banana than a McIntosh apple is like a Red Delicious apple. The only differences were that the peel was greener and darker and had neater corners, and the flesh had a slight pinkish shade. But if I had bought it as a banana, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I’m with you. I’ve accidentally bought plantains several times and didn’t notice until my girlfriend mentioned it (usually after I’d already eaten half of them).
Wow. I wish I could find plantains like that ANYWHERE. I don’t doubt you, but man, every time I’ve gotten plantains they’ve been quite firm, a little bitter, and absolutely needed to be cooked before they could be eaten.
This has also been my experience with them, and I live in a Hispanic neighborhood. I’ve never had anything but cooked plantains
I don’t know. I hate bananas, which I’ve only ever had raw. But I liked fried plantains when I tried them. If I had fried bananas, would they be as good as fried plantains?
There are basically two kinds of fried plaintains. You have your “tostones” which are green plaintains, sliced, fried, squashed flat, and fried again, and you have your “maduros” which are sweet plaintains, pan fried, quite sweet, and very soft/squishy.
If you enjoy maduros, fried bananas are similar, soft and very sweet. If you enjoy tostones, you won’t like fried bananas at all.
Hello Again, what is the difference between green plaintains and sweet plaintains? Are they the same plant but at different degrees of ripening, or different plants? I’ve never noticed either description at the grocery.
Yes and yes. I grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood as well; my mother is Hispanic (Costa Rican). Plantains were a regular part of dinner in my household, and I’ve never encountered a plaintain that was soft and sweet enough raw so that it could be confused with a banana.
I…think I had the tostones type. They weren’t soft and squishy. This was in Colombia. Okay, I just checked Wikipedia, and it seems that there are a variety of fried plantains in Colombia, including maduros and another variant, called tajada. I honestly am not sure what I had. They were tasty, though.
Still wouldn’t want to try them raw.
I have no idea if they are different breeds. I think they are just in different stages of ripeness. The green ones are green! If you peeled them and tried to eat them you’d find them very firm, bitter and very starchy. Fried, they are not at all sweet - they are starchy like french fries.
Sweet plaintains look like rotting bananas – yellow often with lots of patches of black and dark brown, or even completely blackened. I’ve never tried to eat one raw - My impression is that without cooking they may not taste very good. Could be wrong. The flavor when cooked is sweet, like a desert.
The only food in the entire world that my husband flatly refuses to eat, under any circumstances, is the banana. No bananas, banana bread, banana chips, etc. He really likes plantains, at least as cooked by me. I am an American Jewish gal, and am largely plantain ignorant, but I buy plantains that are yellow on the outside, require a knife to get the peeling started, and are a little sweet but not squishy; I then sautee them and serve with salt and lime juice.
They are the same species; the sweet plantains are just much riper (the Spanish word for them, maduros, means “ripe.”) My Salvadoran college roomie had to convince me to wait until they were so black that they looked spoiled before cooking them; that’s when they’re the sweetest.
Not wrong. I’ve tried it, and it’s bad.
FWIW, my mother uses the same type of sweet plaintains to fry the normal way as she does to make patacones. Is that weird?
Right now, I’m not too picky with my plantains. As long as I can find them, I’ll be making either tostones or mofongos with them, doesn’t matter if green or yellow/black.
Although the later would come out sweeter than the green ones.
And having grown up with them… I wonder if either you didn’t get an exceptionally big variety of bananas (they’re usually smaller than platains), or an overly ripe variety of plantain… Or a very green, extra large, banana variety.
Because I wouldn’t eat a plantain raw. They’re hard and starchy and meant to be cooked before served as side food of the gods…
BTW, fried bananas are an excellent dessert. My cheap recipe to make them included cutting them longitudinally, perhaps halving them, and spreading butter on top of them. Then microwave until soft (depended on microwave, no more than 2 mins). Sweet, gooey, cheapo version.
Maduros (made with plantains) are more like a sweet side dish to the main course.
This thread can not be complete without this link.
When I was in San Juan, Puerto Rico a few years ago, I got quite the surprise when my meal arrived with a side of tostones-plantains (which I’d never heard of) instead of the expected mofongo-plantains which I’d had a few times (meh) in Cuban cuisine.
I liked them so much I ordered up some more (in my broken, middle school Spanish) for the rest of the table to enjoy. We gringos ate well that afternoon. Better than french fries, was the general consensus.
Skillet grilled monkfish, white sangria, and those tostones - best lunch ever?
But do fruit* flies also just like bananas, or do they like plantains too?
Moving to Cafe Society.
*I almost said time flies instead of fruit flies, but then I remembered time flies are the ones that like arrows.
Sarabellum1976: Sounds like it!
Usually the sweet is the ripe version of the green. (BTW we also eat the green *bananas *cooked as a starchy veggie.)
There are multiple types of both banana and plantain, including cultivars, hybrids and outright distinct species – the average temperate-region supermarket’s banana, the sort your average Middle American may slice onto his cereal or banana split, tends to be the Cavendish variety (of the Musa acuminata species, sez Wiki). A quite middle-of-the-road breed whose main virtue is it travels well. Most plantains one finds in the market are some form of cultivar or hybrid of varieties present in the particular country of origin. (And yes, there seem to exist varieties that can be eaten raw when ripe enough. None native to THIS island, apparently)