How many teaspoons of sugar in green plantain?

Plantains are cooking bananas: larger, firmer and starchier than the dessert bananas eaten raw. They are a staple across West and Central Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, and they are cooked at every stage of ripeness, from hard green fruit to soft fruit with black skin.

The African and Caribbean foods chart lists plantain twice, green and ripe, both boiled and both at 150g. It is the clearest case on any of Dr Unwin’s charts of one food measured at two stages.

A green plantain is mostly starch, much of it in a resistant form that digests slowly. As the fruit ripens, enzymes turn a large part of that starch into sugars, and the flesh softens and sweetens. The two rows on the chart describe the same plant at different points in that process.

The chart prints only a serve size and a teaspoon figure. The load on this page was back-calculated from the teaspoon figure, and no glycaemic index or carbohydrate weight is given.

Green plantain skin clings to the flesh, so it is usually peeled with a knife. The fruit is then boiled, fried into crisps or pounded, and boiled green plantain is often served with stews and soups.

The next row of the chart is on the ripe plantain page. The dessert banana, measured raw at 120g on the fruits chart, is on the banana page.