Air Fryer Plantain Chips

There's a particular twist of newspaper you get at a Lagos bus stop: hot plantain chips, salty and brittle, made from green plantains too starchy to eat any other way. Ipekere, the Yoruba call them. They're the same idea you'll find across the plantain belt — the Caribbean, Central America, West Africa — wherever the green plantain grows and someone figured out that slicing it thin and frying it hard turns a hard, bland fruit into something you can't stop eating.

The catch with green plantains is they want oil, and a deep fry gives you that even, lacquered crisp from edge to edge. The air fryer asks you to slice thin and shake often instead, and in return you get a chip that snaps just as cleanly with a slick of oil rather than a pot of it. The honesty here is in the simplicity: this is one ingredient, oil, and salt. Nothing on the bag's ingredient list you can't name — because there is no bag.

The only skill involved is slicing evenly. Thin and uniform crisps together; ragged slices give you a few burnt and a few still chewy. A mandoline, and a watchful eye for the early browners, are all you need.

Spread them out in a roomy basket — crowded slices steam and stick instead of crisping.