Understanding Plantain Bananas and Where To Buy Seedlings

Plantain, a major group of banana varieties (genus Musa) that are staple foods in many tropical areas. The edible fruit of plantain bananas has more starch than the common dessert banana and is not eaten raw. Because plantains have the most starch before they ripen, they are usually cooked green, either boiled or fried, in savory dishes. The ripe fruits are mildly sweet and are often cooked with coconut juice or sugar as flavoring. Plantains may also be dried for later use in cooking or ground for use as a meal, which can be further refined to a flour.

Plantain species differ from their banana brethren in that they contain a much higher percentage of starch and less of the sweet stuff. Because of this, they’re not particularly pleasant raw. But when cooked, they have a heavy, filling, potato-like character to them, which has cemented their status as a staple across Latin America, the Caribbean, and west and central Africa. Plantains are soft and pillowy in dishes like mofongo, or they can be fried to a crisp and eaten like chips if sliced thinly. When using them in savory recipes, you want to seek out hardy, firm green plantains, which are generally larger than your average banana.

Ripe plantains (both yellow and black), although still on the starchy and tough side, do have a noticeable sweetness to them and caramelize nicely when cooked. They can be used to make desserts, but are still substantial enough to pair nicely with savory mains

Plantains are usually ready for harvest anywhere from 14 to 20 months depending on the climate and other factors. Flowering usually happens within 10-15 months, while an additional 4-8 months is needed for fruit it develop and ripen.

“The cooking banana and plantain banana is different from the dessert bananas. They are good in terms of high level of antioxidants which is important to our health and the industry is also lucrative,” he said giving an example of one finger of plantain at the market sells at between Sh50 to Sh80 while the ripened single banana goes for Sh5

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