Plantain vs banana comes down to starch. A plantain is a cooking banana: bigger, firmer and starchy, so a green one cooks more like a potato than a fruit. A dessert banana is sweet enough to peel and eat as it is. That's why West Africans cook plantain at every stage from green to black, and hardly anyone eats it raw.
If you're new to plantain, the shop shelf is confusing, because the two fruits sit side by side and look like cousins. They are cousins, as it happens. The quick test is the peel: a plantain's is much thicker, and you'll want a knife to get it off.
What is plantain?
Plantain is a starchy cooking banana, a fruit of the genus Musa grown to be cooked rather than eaten raw. It's family to the banana, and even the names don't draw a hard line between them. Julia Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates, which Purdue University keeps online, says the two names aren't clearly separated. In India there's no split at all: each type is simply rated for dessert or for cooking.
What a cook means by plantain is the larger, more angular fruit grown for the pot. Morton calls it a main food in Ghana. Its best-known dishes change name at every border: fried ripe, it's dodo in Nigeria and alloco in Côte d'Ivoire, and boiled green, it's sese plantains in Cameroon. If you want the wider family, our guide to types of bananas goes through ten of them.
Plantain vs banana: what's the difference?
The difference between a plantain and a banana is where the energy sits. In a dessert banana more of the carbohydrate is sugar, so it's sweet the moment it's ripe. In a plantain more of it is starch, so it needs heat before it tastes of much.
| Banana | Plantain | |
|---|---|---|
| How it's mostly eaten | Raw, as a fruit | Cooked |
| When green | Not eaten raw; can be boiled and mashed | Starchy and not sweet; boiled, made into chips, porridge or flour |
| When ripe | Soft and sweet | Sweeter, and still firm enough to fry or grill |
| Carbohydrate leans towards | Sugar | Starch |
| Calories per 100g | 89 | 122 |
| Carbohydrate per 100g | 23g | 32g |
The nutrition figures come from Healthline's comparison of the two fruits.
Why is plantain cooked and not eaten raw?
Plantain is cooked because its starch needs heat to turn soft and pleasant. Green plantain is starchier than a banana and barely sweet, which is why it's nearly always cooked (Healthline makes the same point). Our grilled plantain page is blunt about it, too: raw plantain is unpleasant and hard to digest.
Can you eat a plantain raw at all? A fully ripe one, yes. Morton describes the plantain as edible raw when it's fully ripe. A ripe plantain is sweeter than a green one, though, and sweeter still once it's cooked. So it's far better cooked, because heat caramelises those sugars.
Green, yellow or black: which plantain should you cook?
Choose your plantain by the dish, not by how ripe you'd like it to be. Like bananas, plantains start green, turn yellow and then go dark brown to black. The darker they get, the sweeter they are.
-
Green (unripe) firm and starchy. Plantain chips, plantain porridge, sese plantains and plantain flour all start here, because the pieces hold their shape and don't go sweet.
-
Yellow (ripe) sweet but still firm enough to slice cleanly. This is the plantain for dodo, alloco, kelewele, gizdodo and grilled plantain.
-
Dark brown to black (very ripe) the softest and sweetest, and too soft for neat slices of dodo. Our fried plantain recipe warns that a fully black one collapses in the oil. Mash it instead, as West African cooks do for klaklo.
Eight AFN plantain recipes, from green to ripe
Each recipe below uses plantain at a different stage, and for every plantain dish we cook, country by country, see our plantain recipes hub. To peel a ripe plantain, cut off both ends, make a slit along its length and pull the peel back. Green plantain is harder. Score the skin lengthways and lift it off in sections, and oil your hands first, because the sap is sticky and stains.
Fried plantain (dodo and alloco)
Fried plantain is ripe plantain, salted and fried until the edges caramelise, and it's the easiest place to start. In Nigeria it's dodo and in Côte d'Ivoire it's alloco. Our fried plantain recipe needs three things: ripe plantain, vegetable oil and salt. Toss the slices in a little salt and fry them until the underside turns golden. Then flip them, fry to the colour you like and drain them in a sieve.
Kelewele
Kelewele is Ghana's spiced fried plantain, sold from stalls in the evening across Accra. The spice is what gives it a name of its own. Ripe plantain is cut into pieces and tossed in blended onion, ginger and garlic with chilli, nutmeg, lemon and salt. It rests for 10 to 20 minutes before it's fried in batches. Our kelewele recipe warns you not to crowd the pan, because that leaves the plantain soggy and full of oil.
Plantain chips
Plantain chips are green plantain sliced paper thin and fried until crisp. They're made across West Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. The trick in our plantain chips recipe is to salt them after frying, not before, because salt draws water to the surface and stops them crisping. Our plantain hub lists them with the other green plantain dishes.
Grilled plantains (boli)
In Nigeria, roasted plantain is boli, cooked over charcoal and often sold with roasted groundnuts. Our grilled plantains recipe brings it indoors with a grill pan or air fryer at about 400°F. Give it four to five minutes on the first side, until deep marks form, then three to four on the other. It only works if the plantain is properly ripe, because it's the sugar that caramelises. An underripe one stays starchy and dull however long it cooks.
Plantain porridge
Nigerian plantain porridge shows why green plantain matters. Unripe plantain is cubed and cooked in water with palm oil, crayfish, dried pepper and smoked fish, then finished with ugwu and scent leaves. Ripe plantain would turn it sweet and mushy, so our plantain porridge recipe sticks to green, which holds its shape in the pot.
Sese plantains (Cameroonian plantain porridge)
Cameroon's version is simpler. Green plantain is boiled with tomato, onion, hot pepper and a spoon of palm oil until the liquid thickens around it. Sese refers to turning the plantain as it cooks, which releases the starch that does the thickening, so you don't need anything else. Our sese plantains recipe finishes it with roasted cashews.
Gizdodo (gizzard and plantain)
Gizdodo is gizzard plus dodo, and it's party food and home food in equal measure across Nigeria. Chicken gizzards are seasoned, cooked for about 25 minutes and then fried. Cubes of ripe plantain are fried separately, and the two meet in a pepper sauce. Our gizdodo recipe drains the blended pepper through a sieve first, so the sauce clings to the gizzards instead of pooling.
Plantain flour
Plantain flour is green plantain sliced, blanched, dried and milled. In Nigeria and Ghana it's used for swallows and to thicken soups. It has to be green, because a ripe plantain would give you a sweet flour that behaves quite differently. Our plantain flour recipe dries the slices in a low oven for 8 to 12 hours before blending and sifting.
Can you use bananas instead of plantain?
Not if you want the same dish. Every recipe above leans on plantain's starch, to hold its shape in a pot, to crisp in oil or to caramelise slowly. A dessert banana has more sugar and much softer flesh.
Our recipe for klaklo (klako), the West African fritter, says it plainly: it's made with mashed ripe plantain, because ordinary banana turns to liquid. Bananas still have their own place, mind you, in dishes like Rwanda's banana beignets. For more on the plantain side of the family, read our fun facts about plantain and African plantain dishes.
Plantain questions people ask
Is a plantain a banana?
Yes, in the family sense. Both are fruits of plants in the genus Musa, and plantain is what cooks call the larger, starchier type grown for cooking. In the kitchen, though, they behave like two different ingredients.
Can you eat plantain raw?
Not usually. A fully ripe plantain can be eaten raw, according to Morton's Fruits of Warm Climates. A green one is starchy and tough raw, Healthline says, which is why plantain is nearly always cooked.
Is plantain healthier than banana?
It isn't lighter. Per 100g, Healthline's figures give plantain 122 calories and 32g of carbohydrate against 89 calories and 23g for banana. Plantain is higher in potassium and vitamin C by the same comparison. How you cook it, fried or boiled, changes the picture more than the fruit does.
What is fried plantain called in Nigeria?
In Nigeria fried ripe plantain is dodo. The same dish is alloco in Côte d'Ivoire, while Ghana's kelewele is spiced before frying, which makes it a different dish rather than a different name.
