Nicole Stephens - DEIB Cooking

Nicole Stephens: Hey guys, this is Nicole Stephens Hospital Contract Manager at Travel Nurse Across America. Today, I'm gonna be teaching you how to make Patacones. This is also known as tostones. Patacones is the Panamanian version. Panama is where my mom is from. So that's why I call them. These are pretty easy to make. There's really not a whole lot involved, but you're gonna want um two plantains and when you're making these, you wanna make sure that they're, they have a little bit of green and yellow if they're too yellow or if they're too black, that's how you would make the sweeter version of this and that's not what we're going for. We want to do the salty version. So just make sure that you get the right color and salt and olive oil and that's literally it. I'll just kind of outline my workstation for you guys. So first I'm gonna be cutting the plantains on this surface. I've got my knife here. And then I'm gonna be smashing them once they've fried a little bit with this glass. I used to have a tool that could do that for me. I can't find it, but either way it's probably easier for everyone to just use a glass anyway. So then I've got my pan here, then I've got my plate with some paper towel so that when they're done frying I can set them here and the oil can soak. So I'm gonna go ahead and put this stove top on and I'm gonna put it on medium heat to try to get the pan hot.

Nicole Stephens: All right guys. So once your pan is hot, you're gonna wanna fill the bottom of the pan with your olive oil. Just enough to fry them, you're not deep frying them. You don't want to put a whole bunch. It's not like frying chicken. So just to cover enough of the bottom of the pan and then after you peel the plantains, you're gonna cut them, but you wanna make sure that you cut them diagonal, cutting them diagonally, helps you smash them better. So that's what I'm gonna do first, I'm gonna start with the ends. I wanna make sure the end is diagonal. So I'm gonna cut this little piece off, but I would say about an inch or so that's how you wanna cut these. All right. So I have five here and then do the same thing about an inch. Cool. All right. So the salt I'm gonna save for last. In the meantime, I'm gonna go ahead and try to do just five of these at a time. If you look at the very bottom of these, you'll see that they're almost turning like a golden yellow color we want for the whole piece of plantain to look that way. And ultimately, once it is kind of golden like that, that's when we're gonna take it, put it back on this board and smash it and then we're gonna put it back in the oil.

Right. So you wanna watch these very closely, make sure they don't burn, you don't want them to get blackened. And these can cook pretty quickly. So I've flipped them to the other side and once that kind of gold color meets in the middle on these, and I'm gonna go ahead and move them over to that board and smash them.

Nicole Stephens: So if I had to estimate it'd be about a minute and a half on each side that you would want to have, um, the piece of the plantain cooking in that oil and now that these are pretty golden, I'm gonna go ahead and use my glass and I'm gonna smash these. So I'm just gonna take it at the top and I'm gonna just press down really hard and you want it to have a very flat appearance, just like that. And these are pretty hot. So I'm gonna use my tongs to kind of move them and we're gonna do the same thing with all of these pieces. This one smashed really nicely can

Nicole Stephens: So we've finished smashing all of these. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put these back, I'm gonna be really careful, but we're gonna go ahead and put these back in the oil. This one's falling a part, a little bit, but it's ok. Right. So we are gonna let these cook for about the same amount of time, about a minute and a half on each side. Again, you're gonna see this like yellowish gold type color on the bottom. When you dip it in the oil, that's what you want, but you want it on the entire piece.

Nicole Stephens: All right. So as you can see these have reached that golden color that we were talking about. I'm gonna go ahead and move them to this plate with some paper towel so that they can, that excess oil can just soak onto the paper towel and off of the plantain. That one got a little bit burned. But that's a good example. You just gotta be really watchful of these while you're cooking them. OK? So I'm gonna do another batch, but really basically just what I've already showed you. The final step is sprinkling some salt on these. So just however much you feel you would want, I like a lot of salt online and that's it. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'm really happy to be able to share this recipe with you. This is something my mom always made growing up. So it's kind of like a comfort food for me. So, thank you.