Yes, we travel on our stomachs. And sometimes our stomachs take us to unusual places. We’ve recently been in Suriname, where the people are diverse and the food is even more so. Indigenous South American, African, and Asian ingredients all blend together for some fantastic fare. Here are our five favourite Surinamese dishes. It was really hard to cut this list down, because the Surinamese also have some stunning vegetables, like the ever-present green beans, mashed eggplants, and stewed greens that come as sides to many meals.
Saoto Soup
This is all about the broth, and many of its ingredients are fairly specific, local to the area. There’s chicken, nutmeg, allspice berries, ginger, five-spice powder, but also laos (galangal powder) and salam (Indonesian bay leaf). You garnish the long-simmering broth with bean sprouts, hardboiled eggs, and fried onions or potatoes or noodles. And you can add spicy soy sauce too. Like many fantastic soups, every cook makes this one a little differently (as you can tell from the featured image and the picture just above).
Pom
This is often translated as ‘casserole’, which it is. But that doesn’t do justice to this yummy holiday dish. It contains tayer (aka taro, a potato-like tuber), citrus juice, and chicken, in a sauce that varies, but often contains some or all of these ingredients: onions, oil, tomatoes, coconut milk, piccalilli, sambal, sugar, salt, pepper, paprika, allspice, and nutmeg.
The chicken-citrus combo (chicken is rubbed with salt and citrus) makes food historians think this dish originates with the eighteenth-century Portuguese-Jewish community in Guyana. Once cooked with the sauce, it goes into a casserole dish and is topped with a mixture of grated tayer [or potato, yucca, etc.] and egg, plus salt, pepper, and more paprika. People often stick leftovers in a loaf of bread with pickles and lettuce, which is delicious too; it tastes like tangy gourmet chicken sloppy joes. And so that was our favourite way to eat it.
Snesi Tayer Soup
There are a ton of great soups in Suriname: okra, peanut, bruine bonen (brown beans), and the one above that tops our list. But tayer soup stood out for us because of its unique flavours. It features taro again, and the ‘Snesi’ in the title reflects the Chinese origins of that vegetable. Typically, the soup includes any meat you have around: small bits of chicken legs, salted beef, pork, etc. You brown the meat, then add onions, allspice berries, taro roots, potatoes, laos powder, celery leaves, Madam Jeanette pepper (aka Scotch bonnet, used whole, so the dish isn’t overly spicy) and coconut milk. It’s rich, with a consistency something like split pea soup, if you add potatoes to it. Surinamese often serve it with rice, but we like it even more with tom-tom (green plantains boiled, mashed and formed into dumplings). That’s in addition to the taro and potatoes: yay for starch!
Bami
Like many delicious Surinamese dishes (chicken satay, for instance!) this is Indonesian in origin, so you might know it as bami goreng. It’s fried noodles, often served with chicken. And it contains what we now know are typical Surinamese flavourings: boullion cubes, allspice berries, five spice powder, ginger, Madam Jeanette pepper, celery leaves. Plus sweet soy sauce and ketchup. We also like the Surinamese version of nasi goreng (fried rice), and moksi alesi (fried rice usually served with dried cod and lots of star anise). But we adore noodles, so this one wins out. In fact, we could eat this every day (oh, wait: we did)!
Bang Bang
This is a fish we fell in love with, also known as acoupa. Which might be corvina or grey snapper (we heard both, and also several other options). Surinamese often smoke it to preserve it for longer, and they serve it in all kinds of ways: shredded over rice, with tomato sauce, in curries, etc., etc. We also had it in salad, which was amazing mostly because we hadn’t seen salad in a good long while. This might be our favourite of the Surinamese dishes we ate.
Plus a Bonus Dish: Bakabana
Fried plantains in peanut sauce. Yes, that’s right: you take something already good, and fry it. The batter is really light because it uses sparkling water. Then you serve it with peanut sauce (the Indonesian kind, which is smokier and richer than the Thai version). Stunning!
We also fell in love with the fresh juices throughout this region, including things we’d had before (limeade), but also things we hadn’t, like ginger, Barbados cherry (acerola, we think, with a taste somewhere between apple and plum), and jamun (Java plum or black plum, sweet and tart, with a juice that stains your lips). And several we couldn’t identify at all.
So: in terms of food, which was our main reason for coming to the region, we were more than happy with the Surinamese dishes we tried. We never had a meal that was less than excellent, even in the jungle. And some of them were more than excellent!
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