Plantain Flour

Recently, I discovered plantain flour in the supermarket. I wasn't looking for it, but the colorful label caught my eye. Even though plantains are a staple in Antillais cuisine, plantain flour doesn't seem to be. After turning it over a few times I added it to my grocery cart.

Mostly, I was thinking about my mother. After a lifetime of eating wheat and wheat products, my mother discovered that she was allergic to wheat about a year ago. Its not a serious allergy, she can allow herself to eat wheat occasionally, but its preferable for her to avoid it. Giving up pasta and bread was not easy, but it was certainly easier thanks to a wide range of rice- or soy-based products found in Asian food stores.

Could plantain flour provide another wheat flour alternative?

Somewhat surprisingly, I wasn't able to find much information online. With the seemingly exponential increase of wheat and gluten allergies, I simply assumed that plantain flour would be one of many proposed alternatives, along with chickpea flour, soybean flour, fava bean flour, etc. Still, I was able to find some interesting tidbits:

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The Post-Harvest Compendium, an initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, has an interesting page on post-harvest operations for the plantain, including the production of plantain flour. Here is a description of how plantain flour is made:

Unripe plantain is traditionally processed into flour in Nigeria and in other west and central African countries. This traditional technology is equally present in Amazonian Bolivia. The preparation method consists of peeling of the fruits with the hands, then cutting the pulp into small pieces, and air drying them for few days. The dried pulp is then ground in a wooden mortar or a corn grinder. The flour produced is mixed with boiling water to prepare an elastic pastry (alama in Nigeria and foufou or fufu in Cameroon) which is eaten with various sauces. The colour of the flour obtained is more or less dark due to the action of browning enzymes. Some improvement of this traditional method, by blanching the plantain pulp at 80°C for 5 minutes and cutting them into round pieces, [...] followed by draining and drying in a drying oven at 65°C for 48 hours or in the sun for some days resulted in the production of a more or less whitish flour. Plantain flour containing 10 percentage of residual humidity and hermetically packed in plastic sachets can be kept for many months without deterioration of its qualities.

The passage goes on to describe various end products, such as fritters and cakes.

Plantains may be staples in many African countries, transformation of plantains into other products seems relatively new. In an issue of African Journal of Biotechnology (1), Nigerian researchers report on the use of wheat and soybean/plantain composite flours. The purpose of the study is to find an alternative to wheat flour bread, whose consumption is steadily rising in the country. As an imported product, wheat is expensive, and so efforts are being made to find alternatives that utilize locally grown produce. The researchers found that plantain supplemented breads had "comparable sensory and nutritional qualities," but required a high proportion of wheat flour to be able to rise.

Another Nigerian study sheds light on the reasons why the use of plantain flour is not widespread (2). They conclude that plantain flour would have to sell for almost twice the price of imported wheat flour in order to be profitable. This clearly illustrates the challenges of introducing a product that competes with wheat. Because there would be both economic and social benefits to weaning Nigeria off imported wheat, the authors of the study recommend government subsidies to encourage the production of plantain flour and plantain four products.

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Anyway, I thought I would start with something simple: crêpes. I used my sister Js recipe for crêpes, which calls for regular wheat flour. I substituted the wheat flour with plantain flour 1 for 1.

3 tablespoons plantain flour
3 teaspoons sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 egg
pinch of salt

The flour is somewhat ashen when compared to regular wheat flour. The seeds in the plantain are not removed and so add black specks to the flour. Plantain flour also has a different odor; it smells slightly sweet, oddly sour. Otherwise, it seems to look and feel quite the same.

The crepes turned out well. Crepes lend well to the substitution because there is no rising action required. There was no particular banana taste.

I'd like to try some other recipes, but I'm a bit reticent to find myself with some soggy, mushy mess. The packaging includes a recipe for a cake, but calls for a mixture of plantain and wheat flour. I also found a recipe for plantain flour pancakes on the website for Barry Farm, a producer in Ohio that carries a wide selection of wheat flour alternatives. Its been a long time since I had pancakes, my last box of pancake mix finished months ago. I think I'll give the plantain pancakes a go*. Its got a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

* I made plaintain pancakes two weeks later.


(1) Olaoye O. A., A. A. Onilude, O. A. Idowu. "Quality characteristics of bread produced from composite flours of wheat, plantain and soybeans."African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 5, No. 11, 2 June 2006, pp. 1102-1106 (here)

(2) Ogazi, P.O. and K.G. Vaidya. "The Place of Plaintain in Bakery Products Production - Economic Aspects." ISHS Acta Horticulturae 123: VI African Symposium on Horticultural Crops. (here)