Here in the Antipodes we have "green bananas", used by our Pasifika brethren from the Islands, for cooking. They are bigger firmer greener banana used much like potato or yam. Baked, toasted, boiled. I was never brave enough to try, when I lived in an area where shops sold them as staple.
As an aside; while studying Ghana at primary school [age around 9yr], our teacher cooked us up a batch of chopped bananas [in place of plantain] and paprika. I have experimented at home since, but it has never tasted the same as on the old electric fry pan in the classroom
Seems to me that "Green Bananas" would be a better match for the Ghanian dish w/ hot red pepper powder instead of paprika (sweets pepper). Ripe Cavendish bananas are too sweet and soft. You want something starchy. Also in the West we need to move away from Cavendish Bananas. They're one breath away from falling vulnerable to one particular disease, because they're all clones from each other.
The irony is there are over 4000 (?) species of bananas of all colours and sizes. We should not be in this position. The global production of bananas is dominated by just a handful (less than 5) companies in the world, all of them using the same Cavendish banana clone. People in the 1st World need to learn to eat "different foods."
Now you have me off on a gardening tangent.... I will only briefly divert down this path...
I was given a scrubby sprout of ornamental banana. It was a small piece that nearly died a few times, ripped out by neighbours dog, ridden by children, moved a couple of times - [long story short] it grew higher than the house, had a stem a a few feet in diameter and had a huge purple flower that looked like a giant feathered elephants trunk to me. My female friends took another perspective shall we say, got the Vapours over it and insisted I chop it down and never grow it in my front yard again.
Back to the fried foods - our fruit and vegetables have been modified so much for commercial use, that what he have now are a pitiful pallid selection that are unrecognisable from the original. So many of our weeds today were the nutritious sautéed salads of yester years. Until recent times people ate off the land and gathered from the meadows, supplemented by the odd rabbit and water fowl. We have lost vast knowledge of what is edible, what is not and how to process it. To make it palatable. There is a movement towards Urban Foraging, it is still considered eccentric and frowned upon
