Plant · P-519

Banana Plantain

Musa balbisiana

This is a wild, heavily seeded banana from eastern and south Asian forests, not a true plantain - most cooking plantains are hybrids that carry its genes, but the fruit of this species itself is rarely eaten raw because of the seed. It is harvested in stages instead: the corm as a vegetable, the inner stem in curries, the male flower cluster as a curry ingredient, and the ripe fruit boiled, baked, fried or roasted - four harvests from one plant. Frost kills the leaves and hard cold kills the top growth to the ground, but where the soil itself does not freeze it regrows from the underground corm; further north it is grown as a replanted annual or kept under cover.