Well Fed Buff: Deep Fried Plantains
Every Thursday, Well Fed Buff serves up the tastiest dishes to boost your HP and stats, just in time for your weekend gaming.
When I first saw Deep Fried Plantains drop from a mob, I immediately thought to myself: banana-cue! Pronounced 'banana queue', as in "barbecue" or "I wanna queue up at the Battlemaster," this simple delicacy is a popular street food in the Philippines, usually skewered with sticks made from bamboo. Kind of like banana kebabs. They're really simple to prepare... probably the simplest of all Well Fed Buffs so far, so even those who have a low cooking skill should be able to prepare them. You can use this recipe to raise your cooking skill, so you can tackle more complex recipes like Winter's Veil Bark or Dragonbreath Chili.
The mats:
A bunch of Banana Charms
2-3 cups of Copper Powder (more or less. cooking banana cue Deep Fried Plantains isn't rocket science)
A Bubbling Cauldron
A Flask of Oil
A few more instructions and gratuitous pictures after the jump.
The real deal
Make sure the bananas are real bananas, and not a baby monkey. You should use cooking bananas like, well, plantains. In the Philippines, we use the plantain's fat cousin, the saba. These are a variety of bananas that are tougher than the regular ones you usually find at the local health bar, with extra thick skin that necessitates slicing off the banana tops to facilitate peeling.
Roll the bananas in the Copper Powder -- aka brown sugar -- then deep fry them. You can pour more sugar into the frying pan if you want. The bananas should soften in about five minutes or so. You can tell the Deep Fried Plantains are ready when the sugar has caramelized and the bananas are tender to the touch (of your spatula! Not your fingers). Take them out of the oil with a pair of tongs (or the spatula mentioned earlier, if you're ghetto) and serve them on a plate. The bamboo barbecue sticks are entirely optional.
Cooking the bananas longer will result in a darker, gooier sugar coating, while cooking for a shorter time with bigger sugar crystals result in a harder, crunchier sugar shell. In the Philippines, we also have a variation of this snack called the Kamote-cue, made with kamote, or sweet potato, which you should really only eat if you're out of bananas or if you're a huge fan of Princess Theradras or Morogrim Tidewalker.
So there you have it, a low-level cooking recipe that you can whip up in under ten minutes (take that, Rachel Ray!). Eating lots of Deep Fried Plantains reportedly has the effect of an Elixir of Giant Growth, except that the only part that seems to grow to giant size is one's gut. It's certainly something to try out in between all those Hot Pockets.
