Haitian foods are some of the most popular and the most loved throughout the globe. When you visit a Haitian food restaurant, you must know what dishes to order. Here is an overview of six must try staples and specialties at a Haitian restaurant.
Pate
These are a kind of puff pastries filled with savory. Usually, pate is also called as patty giving an English accent to the name. It is also common to add the qualifier Haitian or Creole to the word pate to distinguish it from Jamaican patties. The most common fillers used in pate are ground turkey, chicken or smoked herring.
Fritay
This term collectively refers to a range of fried foods. The simplest kind of Fritay is patat, referring to slices of sweet potatoes or green plantain deep fried to be served as a side dish or snack. If meat is used for this preparation, beef or goat or turkey or pork is thoroughly washed, scrubbed with citrus and salt, scalded with salt water and braised in its own juices after covering it with a seasoning paste.
Diriakdjondjon
This is a unique member in the gamut of Haitian cuisine. You can understand it as ‘black rice’ or ‘black mushroom rice’. The term diri refers to rice and the term djon stands for mushroom. Mushrooms are the most expensive ingredient used across Haitian preparations. Only a few restaurants serve this dish regularly, but if one does not serve it regularly, it is worth making a special visit when this dish is served on a particular schedule.
Soup Joumou
This dish is a puree of mild and soft Caribbean pumpkin cooked along with beef stock. The other ingredients in this dish include cabbage, pasta, plantains, celery, root vegetables, carrots, and different cuts of beef that are added to the base of the soup and then seasoned with some select herbs and spices and Scotch bonnet chiles.
Vegetable stews
This preparation uses native Caribbean, European or West African vegetables often cooked together. While the vegetable used bestows the top characteristic to the preparation, meats can either be omitted or added as per choice. Beef is the most common meat used in vegetable stews. Special kind of vegetable stews make use of oxtail or blue crab. It is also common to see goat, pork, shrimp and other meats used in this preparation.
