Plantains rank as the world's tenth most important staple food
Plantains and other cooking bananas feed a huge share of the tropics, ranking tenth among the world's staple foods. In Africa, plantains and bananas supply over a quarter of the calories for more than 70 million people. Because the plants bear fruit all year, they are dependable where storing food is hard.
Linnaeus split bananas into two species by use alone: Musa paradisiaca for plantains and Musa sapientum for sweet dessert fruit. Both turned out to be hybrids of two wild species, Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana, whose genomes geneticists label A and B. The older name, Musa × paradisiaca, now covers them all. Botanists reserve plantain for the AAB group, mostly sterile triploids, while cooking banana is the wider label for starchy cultivars across several genome groups. East African Highland bananas belong to the AAA group. Pacific fe'i bananas, sometimes called mountain plantains, descend from different ancestors altogether.
Compared with dessert bananas, plantains hold more starch and less sugar. Green ones have hard flesh and a peel stiff enough to need a knife; cooked, they taste neutral, much like potatoes. As they yellow, some starch turns to sugar and the fruit softens and caramelises when fried. An average plantain supplies about 220 kilocalories and is a good source of potassium and fibre. The sap stains skin and clothes stubbornly, and the plants snap easily in high winds, leaving plantations exposed to hurricanes.
Frying is the common thread in a global cuisine. Nigerians fry ripe diagonal slices as dodo, and in the town of Ikire overripe pieces are fried almost black with chilli and pressed into cones. Ghanaian street vendors sell kelewele spiced with nutmeg, ginger and chilli, and Yoruba cooks grill plantain as boli with fish and palm-oil sauce. Across the Caribbean and Latin America, tostones are fried, flattened to about half height and fried again; Haitians eat them with a fiery cabbage slaw called pikliz.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, pisang goreng is plantain deep-fried in coconut oil, and Kerala makes a similar battered snack. In Panama and Honduras, sweet fried slices called tajadas accompany rice, meat and beans daily.
Source: Cooking banana
