Nendran banana (ripe plantain)

നേന്ത്രപ്പഴം

Fresh Produce

The Kerala cooking plantain eaten ripe and cooked rather than raw — pazham pori, steamed whole or as ada, mashed for babies. It holds its shape in hot oil where a table banana slumps.

What to know

One nendran is roughly two ordinary bananas by weight, which is why recipes count them by the piece and mean the big fruit. Sliced lengthways it gives three or four fingers. This entry is the ripe stage; green and hard, for chips, the same fruit is bought as raw-banana.

Choosing it: Yellow with black freckles and a little give at the stem end. Green-yellow is still starchy and fries bland; skin gone fully black with soft flesh is for mashing, not slicing.
Storing it: Room temperature, laid out in a single layer so the underside does not bruise, and not in the fridge — the skin blackens there while the flesh stays hard.
If you cannot get it: Sold across Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and in most Indian groceries abroad, often labelled only as plantain. Elsewhere the nearest thing is any large ripe cooking plantain. An ordinary ripe banana is not a substitute for it in a fried dish.

Measures

1 piece ≈ 220 g

Cups here are the Indian 200 ml cup, not the 240 ml US cup — a common reason a recipe does not work. Weigh where you can; the grams are the figure we cook to.

Recipes using nendran banana

None published yet.