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Dessert

Fried Plantains

Fried plantains are sliced ripe yellow plantains coated in flour and fried in boiling lard, served with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Fried Plantains

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the plantains and slice them lengthwise.

  2. Dredge the slices lightly with flour.

Fry

  1. Heat a frying pan filled with boiling lard.

  2. Fry the plantain slices until golden brown.

  3. Remove the plantains with a skimmer and drain excess lard.

Serve

  1. Serve with powdered sugar on the side.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe yellow plantains
Provide the main starchy body and natural sweetness that caramelizes when fried.
Flour
Forms a light coating that helps the slices brown and crisp in the hot fat.
Boiling lard
Conducts heat quickly to cook the slices and browns their surface.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness at serving, contrasting with the savory fried edges.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown. Fat must be hot enough to brown the coated surface quickly; if it is too cool, the slices absorb more lard and turn greasy instead of crisp.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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