Fried Plantain with Candice Brathwaite

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Återkom bara till bufen hotels.com. Våg tienter få en bonusnatt på 100 000 hotell. Vilkor för loalitetsprogrammet gäller, besök webbsidan för mer information. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. I'm Andy Oliver, and this is One Dish, the BBC Radio 4 series about food and how our favourite dishes. shape our memories, our relationships and our lives in general. In every episode I'm inviting a guest to my table and they're bringing a dish that means a lot to them, like a really, really, really lot.

We'll be talking about why it's so important in their lives and also doing a deep dive into its history. Plus, food psychologist Kimberly Wilson will be sharing her science knowledge to help us understand it too. I'm glad somebody knows something about it.

This week I'm joined by author, journalist and TV presenter GetYou. Candace Brathwaite, hello my love. I'm so happy to have you. I'm so happy to be here. And you know, people are always like, are you related to Andy? Is Andy your mum? I'm lacking my dreams, darling. Not to think they're related. I like that.

So Candice, what is your one dish? Okay, and the fight will begin from the top. I say plantain. My dish is fried plantain. Oh my words. Look at your eyes, like I just saw the love. Literally honestly, the taste. The memories, also in some really deep way, I think. that dish or that food speaks to my desire to know more about my heritage. I understand. Yeah. It just reminds me of a home that I don't quite know or understand. Isn't that interesting because

To me, food and the dishes that we love are a direct link to that. They're a direct link to a sense of identity and sort of the space that we've always Now let's talk about so you say plantin. I think I say plantin. Yeah. I do, I say plantin'. Who says plantain? Lots of p the beef is real on social media. They're like, are you a plantainer or a plantainer? I'm plantin'.

I think yeah, plantain's like fancy. No, it's planting, planting. We have some in front of us here. It's sliced in different ways. We've got a sort of horizontal one, one that's just a normal round circle, and then one that's on the bias. Yeah. How would you cut yours? I'm on the bias. Yes. Do you know why? It's just the way I was taught to hold it and say it. Always, always, always. I didn't know why for years.

And when people cut it another way, you sort of look at me, it makes me uncomfortable. I'm like, why are you cutting the planting or wrong? Because when you cut something on the bias, it gives a bigger surface area, which means more natural sugars come out. It's sweeter.

So that you do that so with the courgette, you do it with the planting, anything like that. It means the natural sugars from the ingredient, whatever it is, are uh have got more area to Oh I love that because now we have science to back up the argument that's we've got science. Why are you doing it? We've got science. So and it just looks wrong. I mean what's that? Why is it that shape? Explain to me how it takes. Sturdy but sweet.

Lickle but tallowa, as my dad would say. Like you. I literally and that's what my dad used to say. My dad what I used to say, you're little but tallowa. Lickle but tallowa, we should say to people, means a person. who is small but mighty. Yes. Mighty, tala means mighty. It's more than strong. Yeah. Because it indicates a sense of spirit. Planting to me is little but talawa. Because it's like it's normally the side to your main meal.

But then once you've eaten it's all you can think about. You know that it's nourishing, but it also has the sweetness of a dessert. Which I'm like And you get that thing with planting where you're eating the curry, you're eating the whatever it is, and then you have a bit with the planting and your head goes, uh

That's how it's meant to taste. That's how it's meant to taste. Because you get the sweetness from it with the saltiness of the savory food and you know, there's there's a certain beauty to a sweet thing that lives in a savory world. Do you remember the first time you ate plantin? I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and say my paternal grandmother made it in a very sweaty kitchen situation with something going on a Dutch pot. And unfortunately maybe smoking her temp fag at nine AM whilst cooking.

My maternal side is Bajan, Barbados. My paternal side is Jamaican. Both sides eat plot so it with a baby. Everybody eats plant everybody eats it right across the Caribbean. I don't know anywhere that they don't eat plant in in some way, shape or form.

Almost all plantains and bananas are descended from two wild species of the Musa family. It's thought to have originated on the Pacific Island of New Guinea around eight thousand BC. That is not somewhere where I would have thought about planting. It travelled along trade routes to Indochina, Oceania, and East Africa. Mae'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n.

Isn't that interesting? The monk first encountered it in the Canary Islands, where it was taken from West Africa by Portuguese, and we say this in inverted commas, explorers. People putting their big feet where they weren't necessarily invited. Let's just say that. For now, for the sake of this podcast.

Plantin arrived in the Caribbean before slave traders began to transport enslaved people from Africa across the Atlantic in the sixteen hundreds, but Uh enslaved peoples are very much connected to its story. The people from Africa used cooking techniques from home to prepare planting in the Caribbean. And that's why today there are still lots of similarities between Caribbean and West African styles of cooking planting. And that doesn't just

um relate to planting. There's so many things. Okra, the cuckoo, the fungi all of those dishes. I mean, you know, we could go into so much there. It's what Dr Jessica B. Harris calls the African hand in cooking. It to me I imagine All of the pot. Down the years, decades and decades and decades, generations of people with their hand in the pot, and it makes me feel quite emotional, I've got to say. Nowadays,

Plantins and bananas together are the fourth most important food crop in the world after rice, wheat and maize. That is absolutely fascinating. That's phenomenal. The fourth. The fourth. And I'll cut in there and say, funnily enough, I don't like bananas. I'm not big on bananas. Don't care about bananas. You can keep your bananas unless you fry it.

As always we've got Kimberly Wilson ready and waiting to give us the scientific knowledge. If you have memories of eating a certain food like Candace does with her grandmother's plantain, then you'll also know how it can instantly transport you back. And the biology behind this phenomenon is complex and fascinating. And one major factor is the role of smell.

The sensory neurons that convey information from your skin, ears, Taste buds and eyes have the first stop-off in an area of the brain called the thalamus, a central coordinating hub where information is then passed on to other areas of the brain. However, your sense of smell is different. The nerves in the olfactory bulb that sits at the top of your nose have direct connections to other parts of the brain. and then me Both of these regions play important roles in the regulation of memory.

And emotion. This makes smell the only sense with direct physical connection to the brain's main memory hub. And importantly, most of your senses. It's actually smash. This superhighway to the brain's memory center is why smells and tastes can so powerfully

These special connections are linked to survival because the smell of a food carries important information about how safe it is to consume. A sniff of a mango can tell you if it's ripe and ready to eat. The smell of a piece of fish or some old oil will tell you if it's Rancid and only good for the bin or the compost heap. Every time you eat something, your brain is encoding the information. Smell?

nutrients, the impact it has on your body, and making an unconscious decision about the value of that food. But it's also packaging that up with the contextual information. Who are you with? What are you feeling? In this way, the smell of planting frying in a pan at your grandmother's house comes to remind you of her and how she made you feel.

So here you are. This is how it should be cut. Yeah, this one? Yeah. Okay, yeah. See I wouldn't go for the circle. For me it's just too small. They also look wrong. Because and it's interesting that neither of us so I grew up never knowing, but that's how you cut it. People show you how you cut the planting, that's how you cut the planting.

And every now and again somebody would show up and do like this, which is a horizontal. It just doesn't look right. It looks like something's up. I'm gonna taste it. Because really this bit, the on the bias cut, should be sweeter than this bit. It's so good. Do you know it tastes different? It's different. It's too thick. It's too thick too thick. It also doesn't quite have that toffee edge.

Isn't that interesting? And that's because less sugar has come out. And then these little funny round bits you're right, that's the other thing. Yeah. Because it just looks a bit little. Yeah. Is that where's the rest of it? Here, try that bit there. It feels a bit meager. Yeah, that's that's the word. It's a texture thing actually with that round piece. It's slightly creamier actually. Yeah. Interestingly, it's a little creamier.

But that on the bias, it's got the toffee, it's got the caramelisation, it's got the creaminess, but it's also robust, the taloir thing. It's also got that as well. Yeah, that round one. Time of day. Are you a breakfast planting? Are you a any time of the day? My mum will have planting three times a day. Yeah, any time. And there was it got to a point where my nano, my maternal side

When when planting used to be free for a pound before inflation, she would buy like nine plantins a week for me, you know. And she'd be like, Can these go easy? Because I know that if you have your way by Tuesday, this done.

How would you have it at breakfast? What would you have it with? Um, that is gonna be a side to like a faux English breakfast and I say faux because my English is more of a Jamaican breakfast. Like we spice up the baked beans, we put a little pepper in it, you know them kind of things. Yeah.

So it would be there for lunch. I love a plantain sandwich. Not even gonna lie. Nice. Of course. Double carbs, double carbs. Why are we why are we even trying to pretend? Rice, peas, jerk, chicken, plantin that's me. My mum will have this in the morning. I keep saying my mum, like I don't sit in there eating it with her with a sticky like a fudgy boiled egg. Right, right, right. Crispy bacon.

Planting an avocado and a Johnny cake. This is a very antique breakfast. This is a very antique breakfast. I'm gonna give you another one. Sea salted butter. What? I know. What? Yes, babe. So if you do fry the plant in And they get like really fancy butter and if it's not fancy, put the sea salt in the butter, not just salty butter,'cause you want those crunchy little crystals and then melt that onto the planting. And it's a whole nother universe. It's it's a great thing. Because the soul again

Counterbalances with that natural sweetness and you're in heaven, right? Honestly in heaven. The other thing that you can do to it is put um grated ginger and lime zest at the end and I think they do it in somewhere like Angola. It's one of the African countries that somebody told me my friend Zoe showed it to me one day and I was a bit sceptical. And I had it, it was good.

Wow. It's I wouldn't have it every day. Yeah. But every now and again there's room for a little fancy. Yeah, I love that. What you said about it at the beginning, it being a connector. Yes. Is vitally important. Yeah.

It's really important, not letting the letting those things go, letting those flavours go, letting those moments go, because it's like they live in your soul, right? This is it. And because like again, I'm what they would say is Caribbean heritage and my husband's Nigerian Plantin was literally that bridge between us when he was introducing me to foods that I didn't quite know or understand yet. He was like, Well, babe, just put some plant in with that.

Just stick with the Jonathan the planting for now until you find grades. Then you'll go see you again. But you've got to ease yourself into thinking peanut stew. I love a peanut stew. That's more Sierra Leonean then, isn't it? I love a peanut stew. But that's a whole nother episode of One Dish. Candice, thank you so much. Next time I'll be joined by comedian Phil Wang talking about his favourite Malaysian noodle dish, Wat Tan. All episodes of One Dish are available to Linda.

One dish was presented by me, Andy Oliver, and my guest today was Candy. Our food scientist was Kimberly Wilson and Neil Buttery researched the history of planting. The producer was Lucy Deerlove and the assistant producer was Bucky for Deep A. It's a story glass production for BBC Radio. Uncanny is back. The Hit Paranormal podcast returns with a summer special that will chill you down. It was a real dream holiday really. The family trip of a lifetime becomes the holiday from hell.

Whoever was in that room wanted to do us harm. They wanted to frighten us. The uncanny summer special. Out now. What do you think was in that house? Six very frightened tourists and something else that Subscribe to Uncanny on BBC Sounds. Amazon presenterar Oskars lägg dig. Oskar har inte skottat på över tre år. Om man kan välja mellantrappor och rulltrappen så tar han hsen. Hans ben får inga svåra uppdrag nu för tiden.

Men sen hoppade Oscar på Amazon och köpte en skivstån, fem kilo proteinpulver och en rejäl massagepistol. Nu kan oskar mosa meloner med sina lår och anskar det rogigt. Med supertaj. Bra jobbat, Öskel! Få lägg det att hända hoppa på emmelson.se. Hej! Bellboj från Hotels.com. Bellboj.

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