A Taste of Trini … 60 Different Ways to Gain Weight

Once again beset with generator problems, we feel like we’ve been held captive on the boat waiting for the repairmen to come at various hours (yesterday was his birthday, today is his wife’s). When hearing an announcement on the morning Cruiser’s Net for an all-day island food tour, we immediately signed up.

Jessie James, a local cab driver, is so much more to the cruisers community in Trinidad. He is a one man chamber of commerce extolling the virtues of Trinidad, a tour guide, the “guy who knows where to find everything,” and creator of a variety of interesting tours and guided trips on the island. One we had heard about was the Taste of Trini,  a 10- to 12-hour tour of the “best of Trini.”

Jesse picks us up at 9:00 am in his air-conditioned van along with 3 other cruising couples and we set off from Chaguaramas towards downtown Port of Spain. The idea is Jesse stops at his favorite roadside stands, eateries, or even mango trees to offer his guests a taste of the island’s delights.  He shows us a map of the island and outlines a rough itinerary starting at Chaguaramas, then into Port of Spain and then looping around the east shore of the island, up into the mountains, and returning through the coastal plains.

Jesse James points out the route we're taking during the Taste of Trini.

Just outside of Port of Spain Jesse pulls over with a wry smile on his face and runs into a local restaurant, returning with a bag of food. Setting up shop on the platform between the two front seats, he unveils our “breakfast” selections, a roast bake (bread) a choice of salted cod, swordfish, and boljol, a mixture of salted codfish, tomatoes and hot peppers. Plates are passed forward from the back of the van and each of us in turn gets to savor the salty flavor of local fish spread on a delicious baked bread. “This would be the typical breakfast for a Trinidadian,” says Jesse.

The cover over the van's engine serves as our impromptu serving table.

A classic Trini Breakfast:  Roast Bake bread with a choice of salted cod, swordfish, or boljol.

We head down the Western Main Road and stop at another non-descript diner. Again, Jesse jumps out leaving us to talk about what he might return with.  Setting up shop once again on the engine cover between the seats, he pulls out his serrated kitchen knife and expertly sub-divides another bake, this time a coconut bake with sausages in a Creole sauce and some cheese pies. Excellent. But we wonder, it’s only 10:00 am and we’re already feeling full. What could be left to eat? Oh, we were so naïve early in the trip.

It’s only a short way down the road but again Jesse has pulled over and hopped out before we even know what’s happening.  Shortly later, jumping back in the car with fervent of a master chef on The Food Channel, Jesse is opening new packages:  this time a fried bake bread and sada, a triangular fried Indian bread. Since Trinidad has a fairly large Indian population (after the sugar cane crop died following the infestation of witches’ broom landowners replaced the African slaves with workers from India to work the cocoa, citrus, and other agricultural products). Opening several Styrofoam cups, Jesse extols the virtues of various toppings, such as bodi (green bean), melon choka, plantains, crli (a pimply type of cucumber with a bitter taste), pumpkin, and bok choy.

Our next taste includes fried bake and sada bread, bodi, melon choka, plantains, crli, pumpkin, and bokchoy.

The food is exotic and delicious, but seriously, we are getting full. After a short ride we whip over the to curb again but this time follow Jesse into a roadside diner. He’s getting excited now and orders BBQ’d salted pig’s tail (with some added hot sauce on top), macaroni and cheese, and a rice pilaf.

BBQ'd salted pig's tail and hot sauce.

Oh my God, it’s not even lunchtime yet and we’re all ready for the Barclay lounger. Now driving towards the North Coast Road we’re caught in a torrential rain, but that doesn’t this slow Jessie down.  Certainly not. He pops into a shop packed with locals (must be good) and returns with four plastic containers with potato salad, chicken pilaf, bhaaji spinach rice, and stew fish.

More food:  potato salad, chicken pilaf, bhaaji spinach rice, and stew fish.

Along the way we hear about Jesse’s other passion, his hope that Trinidad can lessen its food imports from foreign sources and develop it’s own home agriculture.  “It’s ridiculous that we import most of our food. The big importers provide lots of funding for local politicians so there’s not a lot of government support for local agriculture.” Looking out the window at the expanses of verdant green hills covered with banana trees, mangoes, avocados, cocoa, figs and the flatter coastal areas that used to be home to massive sugar cane plantations, he sighs at the potential. “Just look at how rich that earth is,” as we pass recently plowed hillsides.

We stop for a fruit break of silk bananas, chikito bananas, golden apple (an apple with a complexion problem), and mangosteen. I’m not a big fruit eater but Meryl seems to be in heaven.

The next stop (I have no clue where since I’m slowly entering a food coma) produces more Styrofoam containers, this time with boiled cassava, bhaaji spinach, and curried duck. We wash it down with my favorite so far, a local red-colored drink from the sorrel herb. Wow!

What we’d all been waiting for was rumored to be just up the road, the famous Deborah’s Hot & Tasty doubles. Trinidadians speak of doubles with reverence. It was hard for us to understand, but we were all waiting for the opportunity to try some. Typically consumed as a breakfast meal, doubles are also eaten at all times of the day, but are harder to find as the day progresses. A double is essentially two pieces of small Roti-type breads overlapping with a dal mixture of lentil beans, vegetables, and hot sauce. Ours was so hot (physically) that we had to wait for them to cool. Much like a good hamburger, there is no polite or tidy way to eat a double. The bread is somewhat delicate and by the time the sauce had cooled enough to roll the bread around it like a burrito, the sauce had softened the bread. Oh what the hell, we just slurped them up and delighted in the delicate tastes of the various spices.

The all time favorite food in Trinidad: doubles with garbonzo beans and HOT pepper sauce.

After a quick stop for some Brazil nuts, complete in their own pod-like container, we continue up the North Coast Road with the ocean on our right.

Jesse meets with a vendor to check out his "straight off the tree" Brazil nuts.

Jessie explains how the Brazil Nuts come prepackaged in their very own nut case.

Passing the Narvia Swamp on the right, one of the largest wetlands in the Caribbean and home to manatees, we stop on one of the gorgeous east shore beaches for lunch. Jessie spreads out a variety of foods on a fallen palm tree, although many of us are simply too full to eat. We did try some drinks, a delicious peanut milk and the somewhat antiseptic tasting Mauby drink (well liked by Trinidadians), as well as passion fruit juice and orange juice.

Beautiful beach on the North Coast Road.

As a chaser of sorts, we stop next to some watermelon fields tended by two somewhat wild looking locals who market themselves under the moniker “Stairway to Heaven.” Apparently these guys are big Led Zeppelin fans. That said, the watermelon was absolutely delicious. Just like the Brazil nuts, there is a vast difference in the taste of fruits and vegetable bought in a store and those purchased in a farmer’s field.

Dallas' Stairway to Heaven watermelon stand.

These guys were really serious Led Zeppelin fans.

Now on the road heading back towards Port of Spain, we pass some rudimentary farming efforts where Jessie spots his favorite vegetable, the crli--a cucumber with the complexion problem. After trying some string beans and peas, one of our group mentions that they’ve never tasted sugar cane (Jessie is obviously now on the homeward stretch and on a quest to break his record of 58 foods in a day). Out come the machetes and down comes a stalk of sugar cane.  A little tough to chew but definitely sugary as we suck away at the stalks.

"Sugar cane, you've never tasted sugar cane?"

We stop at Harry’s Water Park where Jessie produces a dessert with macaroni strudel, coconut roll, and sweet bread. Next we had pholourie balls, little donut centers with a spicy sauce. This is followed a little later with coconut cake, coconut tart, and something called a Ballerina, a dessert roll with layers of red colored coconut. Seriously, I’m just eating crumbs at this point.

Further down the road we approach Jessie’s home village, Gran Couva, which he purports grows the best cocoa in the world. Someone challenges him, saying a place in Grenada made the same claim. Jessie counters with the fact that he once hosted Mr. Mars (of Mars Candy and M&M’s fame) and Mr. Mars said he always added an amount of Gran Couva cocoa to the lesser cocoas from Brazil and Guyana to get the trademark Mars chocolate taste. Touché, Jessie. We even send one of our own down into the dark jungle to retrieve a cocoa pod so everyone could taste the sweet pulp that surrounds the cocoa bean (it’s too bitter to taste raw).

Just west of Gran Couva Jessie stops a various roadside vendors asking about their offerings, finally settling on a colorful stand displaying a variety of pepper sauces. Now I really like hot sauces, but I was cautioned by many to stay away from the red-colored “Scorpion” and settle on the less lethal yellow pepper sauce. Haven’t tried it yet but it looks promising.

We were told that the red pepper sauce could kill a small animal. Probably why they named it "Scorpion."

Our second to last stop is on the outskirts of Port of Spain, now choked in rush hour traffic, where Jessie loads up on “dinner,” including calabash, jerk pork, dasheen, lamb, and macaroni salad. We were beyond satiated, but we ate out of sheer habit. I was too tired to photograph food any longer and Meryl was too tired to write down the names. Thanks to our fearless scribe Zach from South Africa, he did report we had topped 60 foods during our Taste of Trini.

Jessie, seeming satisfied, drove us back to Chaguaramas has we watch miles after miles of bumper-to- bumper traffic.  Trinidad has abundant offshore oil, and diesel fuel here is about $1/gal (we’ve paid as high as $8 while cruising). There is also little public transportation so it seems everyone owns a car. It’s said that the average Trinidadian spends up to four hours a day in traffic. I could have stayed in Seattle to equal that statistic.

With everyone semi-comatose on the ride home, we’re jerked awake as Jessie stops along the road and asks “Cookies and Cream” ice cream or “Carmel Crunch?” I can’t believe we take him up on it. Maybe he had been keeping his own count and knew we were only at 59.