If plantains have turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use them with confidence and how to choose them, cook them, store them, what to substitute, and 15 recipes to try them in.

What are plantains?

Plantains are cooking bananas, a starchy cousin of the sweet banana that you almost never eat raw. They are bigger and firmer than a banana and far less sweet, a daily staple across the Caribbean, Latin America, and West Africa.

Think of them as a vegetable that happens to look like fruit. Green and unripe they behave like a potato; fully ripe and black they turn soft and sweet. The same plantain can be either dish depending on when you cook it.

What never changes is that they need heat. A raw plantain is chalky and astringent, so every recipe fries, bakes, boils, or roasts them first.

Cooking With Plantains by Ripeness

Ripeness is the whole game, and the peel tells you where you are. Green and hard means starchy and savory. Yellow with black spots means a balance of starch and sugar. Fully black and soft means sweet and almost caramel-like.

Green plantains go savory. Sliced thick and twice-fried, they become tostones, the crisp smashed discs you salt and eat like chips.

They also mash and hold up in stews, as in Sancocho with Plantains & Yuca, and stand in for bread in a Jamon Jibarito, where flattened fried green plantains replace the sandwich roll.

Ripe black plantains go sweet. Cut on the diagonal and fried slowly in a little oil, they caramelize into maduros, soft on the inside with browned edges.

Caramelized Ripe Plantains and Oven Baked Sweet Plantains both lean on that sugar, and a Plantain Casserole bakes ripe slices into something close to a sweet side dish.

In between, a spotty yellow plantain is the all-rounder. Emeril's Fried Plantains and a simple plate of Sauteed Plantains work best at this stage, sweet enough to taste of fruit but firm enough to hold their shape.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Plantains love salt and acid against their richness, plus garlic, pork, beans, rice, and coconut milk. Green ones pair with savory dips and stews; ripe ones balance spicy or smoky dishes the way a sweet side does.

The most common mistake is fighting an unripe peel. A green plantain will not slip out of its skin like a banana, so cut off both ends, score the peel lengthwise with a knife, and pry it away in sections.

The second mistake is rushing ripe ones over high heat. Maduros need a moderate flame so their sugar caramelizes instead of scorching; a too-hot pan blackens the outside before the inside goes tender.

Substitutes

There is no exact swap, because the plantain's mix of starch and faint sweetness is unusual. For green, savory uses, a starchy potato or yuca comes closest in texture, with green unripe banana a third option, though none has quite the same flavor.

For ripe, sweet uses, a firm just-ripe regular banana can stand in. It is softer and much sweeter, so cook it gently and expect it to fall apart faster.

Do not reach for a normal dessert banana as a one-for-one substitute in a savory plantain dish. The sweetness and soft texture pull the recipe in the wrong direction, and it cannot crisp into a tostone.

Buying and Storing Plantains

Buy plantains by the stage you need, not by a single ideal of ripe. For tostones, choose hard, fully green fruit; for maduros, pick ones that have turned mostly black and yield to a gentle squeeze. Avoid any with mold at the cut ends or split skins.

Plantains ripen on the counter over a week or more, going from green through yellow to black. To speed it up, keep them in a paper bag; to slow it down, spread them out somewhere cool.

You can refrigerate ripe plantains for a few extra days once they reach the stage you want, even though the skin will blacken further. Cooked plantains keep three to four days in the fridge and reheat well, and fried tostones can be refried straight from frozen.

Quick facts

In Chinese

蕉

British (UK) term

Plantains

en français

plantains

en español

plátanos

Recipes using plantains

There are 15 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 15 recipes