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Hello everyone!

Recipes keep piling up and I keep having a hard time sharing them! Today I found a bit of time to share another Dominican jewel!

As you probably know, Caribbean people are very (VERY) fond of Musaceae. Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Colombians and Dominicans. We’re crazy about our bananas and plantains. We know more varieties than  most people even know exist! LOL! We also eat them in a lot of different ways.

One of the most popular ways to have them is fried. “Tostones” are so popular they have almost become a flag of the Caribbean. The most common tostones are those made from plantains, but we also have green banana tostones.

after the first deep fry

A variety little known to people outside of the Caribbean is the “rulo”. The “rulo” is a very close cousin of the “apple bananas”. They are even categorized as the same but they’re not. They look almost the same, but apple bananas smell, well… just like apples.

The reason why varieties like rulo (pronounced: /rule/-/oh/) are so very Little known is, far from taste and quality, related to business. “Rulos”, once cut, ripen very fast and make their conservation and distribution challenging. So, basically, unless you can have them less than three days after they’ve been cut, you’ll have them ripe or not at all.

Today’s recipe: Rulo tostones, is one you may only have if you got rulos cut the same day. So it is an extremely fresh dish. From the soil to the plate in less than 24 hours!

frying rulos

Rulos are small so I made one tostón out of every single one. (Big plantains, for example, easily give 7-10 tostones)

Ingredients

• Rulos
• Oil
• Salt

Directions

Peel the rulos and heat the oil. If you were frying plantains you’d be cutting small cylinders, but these small rulos will make a single tostón per unit.

rulos

Fry them until they get hard on the outside. Then take them out and let them cool for 5 minutes. Then flatten them a little bit (Some of us prefer some “meat” inside, so we flatten them less) The fry them over until firm. We generally eat them with just a little bit of salt or ketchup (just as chips or French fries)

A big hug from the warm Caribbean.

Arturo

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