I bought a plantain last weekend that had a cool little sticker on it that read:
Green - Use like a potato! Perfect as a side dish, in soups and stews, or deep fried.
Yellow with Brown Spots - Great fried and mashed.
Black - Sweet and mainly used as a dessert.
Mine was slightly green/mostly yellow last week, so I let it sit in our hot summer kitchen on a shelf for slightly over a week. It turned yellow with a fair amount of solid brown at the ends with some spots here and there in between. It was soft to the touch.
I peeled it and it was almost the colour of orange sherbet, a nice, bright, slightly orange-y gold colour. I sliced it in quarters and then sliced the quarters into halves and fried them all in butter, turning frequently for about 10 minutes on low - medium heat, until they were lightly crispy and browned on some surfaces and soft with that glassy look of doneness (versus the dry look before I fried it).
I put the fried plantain pieces in a bowl and covered them with cinnamon for the best tasting dessert I've had in months. The taste was sweet and buttery and spicy, and no sugar or carb rush since there's not as much sugar in these as in their banana cousins, and plenty of stomach-soothing mucilagenous fibre to fill you up for several hours. Simple and delicious!
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