Every Thursday, Well Fed Buff
serves up the tastiest dishes to boost your HP and stats, just in time for your weekend gaming.When I first saw
Deep Fried Plantains drop from a mob, I immediately thought to myself:
banana-cue! Pronounced 'banana queue', as in "barbecue" or "I wanna queue up at the Battlemaster," this simple delicacy is a popular street food in the Philippines, usually skewered with sticks made from bamboo. Kind of like banana kebabs. They're really simple to prepare... probably the simplest of all
Well Fed Buffs so far, so even those who have a low cooking skill should be able to prepare them. You can use this recipe to raise your cooking skill, so you can tackle more complex recipes like
Winter's Veil Bark or
Dragonbreath Chili.
The mats:A bunch of
Banana Charms2-3 cups of
Copper Powder (more or less. cooking
banana cue Deep Fried Plantains isn't rocket science)
A Bubbling CauldronA Flask of OilA few more instructions and gratuitous pictures after the jump.
The real dealMake sure the bananas are real bananas, and not
a baby monkey. You should use cooking bananas like, well,
plantains. In the Philippines, we use the plantain's fat cousin, the
saba. These are a variety of bananas that are tougher than the regular ones you usually find at the local health bar, with extra thick skin that necessitates slicing off the banana tops to facilitate peeling.
Roll the bananas in the Copper Powder -- aka brown sugar -- then deep fry them. You can pour more sugar into the frying pan if you want. The bananas should soften in about five minutes or so. You can tell the Deep Fried Plantains are ready when the sugar has caramelized and the bananas are tender to the touch (of your spatula! Not your fingers). Take them out of the oil with a pair of tongs (or the spatula mentioned earlier, if you're ghetto) and serve them on a plate. The bamboo barbecue sticks are entirely optional.
Cooking the bananas longer will result in a darker, gooier sugar coating, while cooking for a shorter time with bigger sugar crystals result in a harder, crunchier sugar shell. In the Philippines, we also have a variation of this snack called the Kamote-cue, made with
kamote, or sweet potato, which you should really only eat if you're out of bananas or if you're a huge fan of
Princess Theradras or
Morogrim Tidewalker.
So there you have it, a low-level cooking recipe that you can whip up in under ten minutes (take
that, Rachel Ray!). Eating lots of Deep Fried Plantains reportedly has the effect of an
Elixir of Giant Growth, except that the only part that seems to grow to giant size is one's gut. It's certainly something to try out in between all those Hot Pockets.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-20-2008 @ 3:05PM
will said...
Love the captions on the pics. Made me lol irl.
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 3:22PM
sleepah said...
omg. that made me so hungry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantain#Pl.C3.A1tanos_Maduros
3-20-2008 @ 3:17PM
Nick S said...
hehe take that, rachel ray indeed. :-)
my bananas just found a purpose in life. time to use up massive quantities of oil.
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 3:17PM
Angry Joe said...
I'm gonna try this with GOP bananas.
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 3:22PM
smiley apples said...
astig... so somebody in wow insider knows what a banana cue is... XD
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 3:32PM
Jasperwind said...
I love fried bananas. I never heard of it until I went to Brazil. They do that a lot there.
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 3:40PM
CaffeineRage said...
Call me crazy, but I would have thought you would have cooked plantains for this dish.
Ah well, still a good recipe.
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 3:55PM
Steve_S said...
did you somehow miss this:
You can tell the Deep Fried Plantains are ready when the sugar has caramelized and the bananas are tender to the touch (of your spatula! Not your fingers).
3-20-2008 @ 6:21PM
Lilith said...
Yea plantains =/= bananas.
3-20-2008 @ 9:21PM
Zach said...
Common dessert bananas -
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta
Class: Liliopsida
Order: Zingiberales
Family: Musaceae
Genus: Musa
Cooking plantains (also commonly known as cooking bananas or banana plantains):
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Magnoliophyta
Class: Liliopsida
Order: Zingiberales
Family: Musaceae
Genus: Musa
The difference is in the species. Dessert bananas are eaten raw, while plantains require cooking. The bananas/plantains shown above cannot be eaten raw. They're called saba, a fatter kind of plantain.
3-20-2008 @ 3:50PM
George said...
Aye; tasty recipe, although I was expecting to see the fried plantain disks I so love...
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 9:23PM
Zach said...
Haha, I think I know what you mean! We have something like that called 'maruya', and they're like fritters coated with flour.
3-20-2008 @ 9:41PM
George said...
Heh; yeah! Disk them, par-fry them, smash 'em flat, and do a final fry. Mmmmmmm... ^_^
3-20-2008 @ 4:09PM
SkyE said...
In Singapore we have a snack called "Goreng Pisang", which is also technically Deep Fried Bananas. Except that the Bananas are coated with a flour mixture before frying.
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 4:26PM
kunukia said...
I lived in Africa (Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika and Ouagadougou, Haute Volta the countries now called Tanzania and Burkina Faso) as a kid, and we used to eat fried bananas a lot. Yummm...
Reply
3-20-2008 @ 5:49PM
Thander said...
I'll always remember my outdoor school trip as the first time I had fried bananas.
Reply
3-21-2008 @ 1:24AM
Anaughtybear said...
How the hell do these drop off mobs in Winterspring? Are there secret trade routes the furbolg use to acquire these from mobs in STV?
Reply
3-21-2008 @ 6:34AM
BenMS said...
That's a damn good question. I'd blame the Steamwheedle Cartel for this one - any time there's a profit to be made they'll be there, front and centre.
3-31-2008 @ 5:08PM
Joel said...
The recipe didn't work for me unfortunately. As soon as I dropped the plantains into my "bubbling caldron" the sugar was left sitting on top of the oil, while the plantain sat at the bottom. My friend told me to then do it with cracked corn flakes (which also didn't work). We eventually poured the oil out on the snow and threw out the plantains we had left.
What did I do wrong? E-mail me at joel_cool321@yahoo.ca with a solution, these look great!
Reply
4-07-2008 @ 3:46PM
Zach said...
Sorry for the super late reply, Joel! If this happens, you should try dumping the sugar (and lots of it!) directly into the frying oil with the bananas, instead of rolling the bananas into the sugar then dropping it in the oil. That's the likely culprit. Hope it works! Oooh, and I would hate to see wasted plantains!