Ripe plantains are slow-fried in oil until deeply caramelized and sweet. They get served with an herbal mint and parsley mojo sauce that brings a bright, acidic element to the sweet-and-savory snack.
Shallow-frying the plantains at moderate heat and then lowering the temperature for the final duration lets them cook relatively slowly, giving the sugars plenty of time to caramelize and get extra sweet without giving the plantain a chance to dry out.
I picked up the nasty, black, almost-starting-to-shrivel things from the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter and was about halfway to the garbage when I was stopped short by my wife's sudden and very loud cry:What do you mean, what am I doing, dear? I'm throwing out these rotten plantains that now look more like something produced by the dog than something we should be keeping in the good company of our perfectly respectable grapefruits and mangoes.
I'm glad she caught me when she did. As someone who loves a good salty-sweet snack, fried ripe plantains represent one of the pinnacles of the form.* ever since the first time her Aunt Gloria made them for us many years ago, though I never bothered to peek into her kitchen to see how she did it. Soft and tender with a lightly greasy exterior and a sweet, caramelized flavor, they don't have the crispness you may expect from a starchier fried food, but that's part of their appeal.
Just like bananas, apples, and tomatoes, plantains ripen better at room temperature in a relatively enclosed environment, like in a bowl with other fruits, or inside a paper bag. Plantains give off ethylene gas, the natural trigger for ripening. The more concentrated that gas, the faster the fruit will ripen. From green to black, a plantain can take over a month to fully mature in a bowl. Put them in a paper bag and the time will be cut down to a matter of weeks or even days.
Luckily, most good Latin markets will sell plantains at a variety of maturity levels, so ripening need not take that long.The trick to great maduros is to cook them relatively slowly, giving the sugars plenty of time to caramelize and get extra sweet without giving the plantain a chance to dry out.
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