Food Preserving And Safety Using Plantain Leaves

Leaving food sitting on shelves for long periods, you risk it spoiling and becoming potentially deadly with each passing moment! There have been many wonderful developments and innovations that have made food preservation, fast, easy, and more convenient, but it is important that you not let this make you careless. Food safety must always be practiced!

All methods of food preservation and safety “My Grandma’s Way” always done with plantain leaves! Although plantain leaves clearly stick in my mind for they have prevailed even today in our culture, Grandma had various preservation methods for different foods. She cured food, smoked food, roasted food, simmered food, dried food and heated food.

The plantain crop is a wonder. All its parts are useful for survival to our human lives. The fruit is used for eating, the leaves preserve other foods, the stem has medicinal properties for infants digestive problems, the flower in its raw state is also considered highly nutritious although it has a tendency to permanently brown teeth if its sap drops on them.

This sap now that I consider it, is "the thorn" of the plantain. The preparation of the plantains requires a rigorous peeling process which cannot be done without a very sharp knife. Whilst peeling the sap drips and drips like a licking tap. On being exposed to the air it starts sticking together. It sticks and turns black in the process. Removing this sticky substance from the hands cannot be done with mere soap. One has to use paw paw leaves to scrub the stuff off!

Plantains are a staple food in the tropical regions of the world, treated in much the same way as potatoes and with a similar neutral flavor and texture when the unripe fruit is cooked by steaming, boiling or frying. Fully developed plantain leaves can exceed two meters in length. They are similar to banana leaves, but are larger and stronger. Plantain leaves can preserve food -

· Whilst in their raw state

· When sun- dried

· When lightly smoked over fire

· When cooked

The different states of these leaves are all good food storage materials but most outstandingly, they give distinctive pleasant aroma to the food they store!

Treating Plantain Leaves for Storage

· Sun- drying

· Light smoking

· Steaming

Smoked Plantain Leaf

Sauces and vegetables are often prepared in plantain leaves lightly smoked over fire giving them a distinctive taste and smell. This is a short 4 to 6 minute process. This is done by initially cutting away part of the main vein of the plantain leaf to give it flexibility while folding. The leaf is then carefully held over a fire for the heat to go through it.

This leaf will eventually turn soft allover. Interestingly, when this is done the leaf is much firmer and does not break easily. This is the reason the heating is done in the first place; it folds over with ease and it is not easily breakable.

Meat and fish cut up with their ingredients onions, salt, curry and vegetables are all placed in these leaves without frying but with very little water barely covering the sauce. The plantain leaf is then tied up with a dry string from the stem of a banana plant to keep the liquid intact. It is placed in a pan filled with about a third water and has chopped banana fruit stalks for bases. This pan is then placed over a fire to cook.

Sun Dried Plantain Leaf

Plantains, yams, sweet potatoes and cassava are often prepared using sun dried plantain leaves. Any of these foods is peeled, wrapped in the plant's leaves and set in a cooking pot on the stalks which have been removed from the leaves. The pot is then placed on a charcoal fire and the plantain cooks by steam from the water placed at the bottom of the cooking pot.

While uncooked, the plantain is white and fairly hard. On steaming turns it soft and yellow. The plantain is then mashed while still wrapped in the leaves, and often is served on a steamed leaf. It often eaten with vegetable sauce, ground peanut or meat; goat meat and beef are common. The plantain is a crop consumed when cooked, in contrast to the soft, sweet banana which is sometimes called the dessert banana. Plantains tend to be firmer and lower in sugar content than dessert bananas.

The Steamed Plantain Leaf

This leaf is always used during the cooking of plantain. It useful when yams, sweet potatoes or cassava are what one plans to cook. It is readily flexible, easily folds over and wraps these hard foods to keep their aroma and shapes not to crack into pieces in the water they are being steamed in.

Additional foods I remember, as I fondly remember grandma’s way that come to mind as food safety procedures are her fish and her pineapple and the way she preserved them to extend their shelf life. She was in the habit of having “extras” for when guests pop in and hence devising means of preserving special foods for those guests of hers!

To keep fish for longer periods she would always marinate it with extra salt. She would then slowly roast it over coals as opposed to a direct fire. This meant that it would cook longer than normal but it would last longer when preserved. Once done and readily cooked she would wrap it up in a smoked banana leaf. This fish cooked this way lasted a good while.

She would ensure that once in a while she slightly re- smoked it to keep it from going bad. The banana leaf kept its aroma intact and helped keep it from breaking in smaller pieces. On top of all this, she would store this fish on the permanent shelf above the fire place where it was warmed up with each and every new light up of the fireplace!

A pineapple, once cut up ferments and rots up quite easily. Grandma had a trick that had her cut pineapples lasting for 8 to 10 days without going to waste. She would cut off what we would immediately eat and to preserve the rest, she would get a new plantain leaf from her garden in which she would keep the leftover piece.

To ensure that steamed plantain, potatoes, yams were served warm the next day, grandma had a fireplace with coals that never died out. She would open up the fireplace after the cooking and eating was done, having securely wrapped the food in cooked plantain leaves, she would place the wrapped food in the middle of the warm fireplace and cover the food and all round it first with warm ashes and finally cover the top with hot coals that would last even two days straight!

The backend of the fireplace was grandma’s hot tea keeping place. She always had a hot cup of tea in the kettle there with mint or lemon grass in it. She blocked the aroma of the contents in the kettle with a tightly folded banana leaf pushed in the spout and it always worked. Her tea is the best tea I have ever had to test in my life, I should say.