Plantain Soup / Sopi di Banana

Information

Plantain Soup, known as Sopi di Banana, is a comforting dish enjoyed in Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire. Green plantain gives the soup body while vegetables, herbs, and seasoning create a warm Caribbean flavor.

Ingredients

• 1 lb of salted beef
• 1 lb of salted pig tail
• 3 cups of salted water (left over water after boiling the salted beef and tail)
• 4 large ripe plantain. Not too ripe. Needs to be yellow with some black spots
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 2 potatoes
• 2 sweet potatoes
• 2 teaspoon of oil
• 1 tablespoon of whole Jamaican Dried Pimento
• 1 tablespoon of cloves
• 5 tablespoon of sugar
• 1 tablespoon of cornmeal
• 1 teaspoon of tumeric

Preparation

1. Let the salted tail and beef sit overnight in plenty of water
2. Next morning rinse them well and let them sit a little bit more in water
3. Cut the tail and the beef into smaller pieces
4. Put enough water to boil to cover the tail and the beef and let them boil until the meat is almost done or tender
5. Peel all the potatoes and diced them in small pieces. 
6. Peel the plantain and slice them so the get a circle shape
7. Pull 3 cups of salted water from the pot where you boiled the beef and tail into a soup pot
8. Heat up plain water in a different clean pot. Heat over 4 cups of water .
9. Put soup pot on medium high heat and add the 4 cups of hot water.
10. Add the beef, tail, bananas, potatoes, sweet potatoes,cinnamon sticks, oil, dried pimentos, and the cloves into the soup pot and let them all cook 
11. Stir everything together, if the content of the pot start creating a foam, use a large spoon to remove this foam
12. Let it cook for about 20 minutes. Stir content to avoid any ingredient to get stuck on the bottom of the pot
13. Put the cornmeal and the tumeric in 1/2 cup of water and mix them well
14. When the potatoes and bananas are soft, pour the cornmeal mix, sugar, and tumeric into the soup pot and let it cook for another 3 minutes while stirring the content.
15. Remove the pimento, cloves, and cinnamon stick from the soup
16. Soup is ready to server with funchi