The other day I spotted plantain at the local grocery store. Excited at the prospect of making some plantain chips I picked up a packet and the following day tried baking chips. Oh God ! that was such a mistake ! With my first batch coming out of the oven I realized that things weren't going so well so readjusting the oven temperatures i put in the next batch. only to realize minutes later that certain savories are best enjoyed when dipped in copious amounts of sin. else you end up chewing leathery chips rather than crunching them. so i left the rest of the plantains just like that planning to come back to them in a few days. and when days rolled to weeks the plantains became too ripe for chips and had to be used up in other recipes. and since it was my bread-baking day i decided to use one of them in place of banana in Banana Oatmeal Bread while i saved the other for a recipe i had bookmarked.
Last Saturday, following the recipe from Beth Hensperger's Cookbook The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook, I had made the Banana Oatmeal Bread with Macadamia Nuts(Pg 444). We really enjoyed that bread. so I naturally turned to that recipe for the Plantain Bread. I made a few minor changes here and there keeping the basic recipe intact. however I would like to mention here that when baking the bread with plantain it is fine if one uses less yeast because this loaf swelled up a lot more in comparison to the banana bread and therefore that noticeable dip that you can see in the picture below. This is a sweet loaf and its slices are best enjoyed when microwaved for 20 seconds and served with butter or jam. We tried it in cheese sandwich too, but that didn't work so well. so essentially this is a breakfast bread..
and since we were at the breakfast table i thought i'll share my jam recipe as well. Its a strawberry jam that i made last week using Ina Garten's recipe as a guideline.. I used jaggery instead of sugar and a hint of salt . and that kind of signatured a Grandma's Home-made label on the Jam :)
i now the recipes....
