What Is Plantain Flour - Gluten Free Plantain Flour Made From Plantain Bananas

What IS Plantain Flour - How To Make Plantain Flour At Home

We have already seen what is plantain flour. So let us see how to make plantain flour at home.

If you decide to make banana flour by yourself, it is very important to choose the right fruits. I do not know which all varieties of bananas can be used to produce the flour, but I have seen mostly everyone using only the plantains. They are quite large and ideal for cooking, as they tend to me more starchy and loaded with lots of healthy nutrients good for health. Just like avocados, if you want to increase your weight by using healthy food, adding plantains to your diet can help. It is generally believed that eating a ripe plantain everyday can improve your weight in a healthy way.

One cup of sliced raw plantains contain 181 Calories. Plantains are also a very good source of potassium and also many important vitamins and minerals including Vitamin B6.

Coming back to the topic, you can prepare really good quality banana flour at your home if you use good plantains. 

Neither ripe nor very raw plantains are used, but the plantains that are close to ripening are used to make the flour. If you touch, the fruits will be little soft, but not mushy. And the colour of the peel will still be green, but starting to fade in to a pale green. The fruits at this stage will be quite sweet too. Once you prepare the flour, it will be mostly naturally sweet, so you don't have to add any additional sweeteners. However, the sweetness cannot be guaranteed, since some plantains take longer time to become ripe and sweet.

It looks like usual green bananas are also used by food manufacturers to produce the flour, even though I haven't seen anyone using them to make the flour at home.

As you might have already heard, using green bananas in diet regularly may cause constipation in some people, similar to other starchy food like rice. When we use them for baby cereals, we don't give them everyday but most usually on alternate days so that it won't cause problems. If you choose the bananas by yourself to prepare the flour, you can choose bananas that are more close to the ripening stage.

Green bananas are starchy fruits, with less sugar content. It is heart healthy and nutritious. The good thing with the green, unripe fruits is that they are do not increase the blood sugar level. In fact, the green bananas are good to regulate the blood sugar level and also the blood pressure level.

Since we are making the flour using only the green plantains, the sundried flour is expected to have the nutrients present in the green fruits. In simple words, what makes banana flour superior to most of the processed flours made from grains is that it is more nutritious and gluten free. However, I do not recommend replacing all the flours made of grains with banana flour, but adding banana flour to some of the food items that require flour can very much help to reduce the ill effects caused by grains.

If you are usually fine with using ripe bananas and green bananas and if your diet is also rich with fibre rich foods, banana flour should be fine for you. However, just like any other food, you might have to find out that yourself.

Once you have chosen the plantains at the right stage, which are about to ripe soon, the first and the most important job is done. The next step is to peel the fruits and then thinly slice them. The slices should be almost even and round. The slices will not stick each other and will not be too slippery, since the fruits are not yet ripe.

Spread the slices evenly in a single layer in any mat or paper, and place this under direct sunlight during the day time. Make sure that the fruit slices are not exposed to rain. To make the flour, the slices should get full exposure to sun for few days. Once the fruit slices are dried really well, you can make sure that by touching and feeling the texture of the slices. At this stage, you can grind them into fine powdered form and the flour is ready to be used!

It will be a good idea to prepare the banana flour during summer and storing it for using all through the year.

You might wonder why you should make flour from bananas when you can use the fresh bananas. The purpose is to make a gluten free flour that you can use in some of the food recipes that you normally need flours made out of grains. The texture of fresh bananas and the dried flour is very different, and the latter has a distinct flavour too. You can easily use the banana flour to prepare cereal for babies, within minutes. The texture and consistency will be very similar to that of rice cereal, and in fact this is more tasty.

If you are using banana flour to make baby food, make sure that you do not use it as a replacement for any other food, but you can use it as an additional source of nutrition. Also, as I mentioned above, it is better to give the banana flour cereal on alternate days so that it won't upset the stomach of little ones.

I have never used banana flour to bake anything or to cook anything other than baby cereal and as a flavouring for milk. So I can't say how this would taste in baked goods like muffins and cakes. The reason why I have never tried it is that the banana flour I have is homemade, which I use just for my kids.

Apparently, the flour is ideal for baking and cooking as well, and many people claim to have tried banana flour successfully in making pancakes, muffins and cakes.

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If you want to prepare the flour at home, you can either go the traditional way where you have to dry the fruits by exposing them in sun. Otherwise you can use an electric food dehydrator to make the process easy.