The Carambola or star fruit as it is known in the states is a sour fruit that personally I like quite a bit. I found that if you take a Carambola fruit and put either salt or season salt on it, the flavor is enhanced and it tastes even better. It can be found at one place that I know of but there are more that you can find I’m sure. Surprisingly enough this is found close by to the gold mine near Cotui, an hour and a half or so from our local Fantino area. I found that the best way to eat a caranbola is to salt one of the five edges and take a big bite out of the salted area, then re-salt it and again take a big bite out of it. As you are eating this, I would say that there is more acidity than a lemon or lime. Pretty sour! (more…)

Tostonis are the Dominican equivalent to French fries. That is not to say you can’t find French fries here. I know there are some of you who would never dream of coming to country where you can’t get French fries. You can rest assured that you can find French fries here.

But, more commonly you will find tostonis come with the plate of the day instead of French fries. That may sound strange seeing  tostonis are made from a relative of the banana, the plantain, but they are actually pretty good. They are not quite the same as a French fry, more like a combination of a French fry and a potato chip.

Tostonis are actually pretty simple to make, the biggest thing you need to worry about is the source material. Being that the plantain is a close relative of the banana, you need to be careful as to how you choose your plantain. (more…)

Sounds like something that wouldn’t taste too good doesn’t it? Well, this vegetable is much like a pumpkin but has a few differences. First as you can see, it has skin just like a watermelon, but it isn’t. This is actually how we stumbled upon this vegetable. As I was looking for a new fruit to try, I saw this, mistook it for a fruit and bought the whole thing. So as I got home and opened it up expecting it to be a fruit, I noticed it looked a lot like a pumpkin, with the seeds and everything. So we went around and asked different people how do you prepare this? Just like a pumpkin. So we have about 5 pounds of this fruit vegetable thing and have no idea what we can do with it. So we decided to cook it like a pumpkin and its good for a pumpkin pie type of dessert. Here in the DR you can generally get an auyama for a few hundred pesos. Not to bad for a pumpkin! (more…)

If you going learn how to cook Dominican style, arepitas are a recipe you can’t go without. They are usually not eaten as commonly as rice and beans, but they are definitely essential to the Dominican diet.

You will be hard pressed to find someone that doesn’t like these little deep fried yucca balls. And as long as you are pay attention they are pretty hard to mess up.

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Buying food in the Dominican Republic. If you have come from the US or Europe, buying food in the Dominican Republic can be quite different from what you are used to. Some even classify buying food here as a skill. Something that takes learning and there are plenty of theories to how it is best done.

If you have never visited the Dominican Republic, you are probably thinking, “How do you figure? What’s so hard about going to the supermarket, finding what you want and buying it?”

If you are in a larger town, it may be that simple, but if you are in a smaller town; there might not even be any supermarkets. In which case you will be buying things at a lot of colmados or in the market place. (a colmado is a little corner market that many times is no bigger that 10’ by 10’)

What You Are Dealing With

Colmados and venders in the marketplace are normally owned by and single person or family and the vast majority of their products are highly negotiable. This means two things. The first one is good news; you can pretty much always get the price down a little lower. And Two, not so good; they are going to try and the most they can out of you. (more…)

White rice is often eaten with habichuelas and if you have ever visited the country you know if you are cooking for Dominicans, knowing how to make habichuelas and rice is a necessity.

White rice is one of the simplest things to cook from scratch, or so it seems. You would think it would be easy to cook, after all it only has three basic ingredients: rice, water and salt. But if you have cooked rice the past you know it can be testy and if not cooked just right it can turn out either crunchy or sticky.

Rest assured there is any easy way of cooking white rice that can get you that perfect fluffy rice every time. (more…)

We are exited to let you know we are adding a new section to the DR-Dominican. A cooking section that will be featuring all Dominican Recipes.

We will be including information on how to shop in the Dominican Republic, avoid getting ripped off and how look for what you want. We will also be talking about how to get a hold of some of the necessary ingredients that are difficult to find in the US.

Fill free to take a look at what we have so far in our cooking section.

Habichuelas to Dominicans are like Frijoles(refried beans) to Mexicans. Both are based off of beans and highly essential to the daily diet.

Habichuelas are typically made with red or black beans, but unlike Frijoles they are served whole, not mashed. They also are much saucier usually have almost soup like consistency. This makes them great to put over rice, with the Habichuela sauce flavoring the rice.

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Here in the Dominican Republic there are many things that you aren’t always used to. One of these things that we are not always used to is the fruit stands.

Now, there are some fruit stands in the U.S. and probably in other places too, but I doubt that they are like the fruit stands in the Dominican Republic. To start off, a quick description of the stands here, they are made of anything that you could think of, a lot of them being on the side of a house or in a house. But to make it even more different, (more…)