Plantain Chips from the Tomb Raider Cookbook

Plantain Chips are a snack enjoyed in tropical regions where plantains or bananas grow. They can be a power snack and marginally healthier than potato chips, depending on how they're cooked. The Tomb Raider Cookbook's recipe for these has you fry them, and afterwards season them with salt. Maybe not the healthiest, but then you're not meant to eat these every day, so live a little.

This recipe is categorized in the cookbook's Africa chapter, but is not themed around a specific country. It was the last African recipe I hadn't made from the book yet. In terms of the real world, fried plantains are enjoyed in Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, the DR Congo and Ghana. Lara visits Ghana in Tomb Raider: Legend (as discussed in my Jollof post), and in The Legend of Lara Croft, she races a megalomaniac woman in pursuit of Orisha masks that can remake the world.

I have cooked plantains before, once pan-frying ripe ones with sugar as a side dish to accompany jerk chicken with rice and peas. That said, I can only get plantains (as in, cooking bananas or true plantains) from specialty stores. I ordered them through a local grocery delivery service and they were humongous. That's what I needed though, and it was enough to make quite a lot of chips.

The plantains you get need to be unripe, i.e. the peel needs to be green, for this to work. Ripe plantains would disintegrate when cut thinly and fried. The only issue is that you can't peel them as easily when they're unripe. I tried to peel the first one like I would a normal banana, and the skin was too tough to rip apart, so I ended up getting a paring knife to peel it off. Once the plantains were peeled, I used a mandolin to cut them, although the recipe says you can do it as thin as possible with a knife if you don't have a mandolin.

What's more, I have a mandolin where you put the food into a feeding tube and push it into a downward slicing blade. Your fingers are nowhere near it, removing the danger commonly associated with the appliance. Although the recipe said it makes bite-sized, round chips, mine were sometimes on an angle depending on which way the plantain was pushed through the blade. Whatever, they still cooked the way I wanted them to.

I went outside to fry the plantain chips in batches on my barbecue side burner, keeping the oil (which I reused from Lomo Saltado) at a steady balance. The chips came out perfectly crisp, some getting browner than others depending on how long I kept them in the oil. I went lighter on the seasoning than I could have, mainly to ensure I didn't accidentally oversalt any I'd already salted. They would go well with some sort of dip. The next day, they weren't as crispy as before, so they're best eaten the same day you cook them, but they're still tasty.

If you want to make this recipe for Plantain Chips yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide.