Trinidad and Tobago cuisine facts for kids
Trinidad and Tobago has a special history, and its food shows influences from many cultures! You'll find tastes from India, West Africa, Creole traditions, Europe, America, China, Amerindian people, and Latin America. Seafood dishes are very popular, especially curried crab with dumplings. The islands are also famous for "blue food," which includes root vegetables like dasheen (taro root), sweet potato, eddoe, cassava, and yam, often served in soups and stews.
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Main Meals in Trinidad and Tobago
Breakfast Dishes
For breakfast, people in Trinidad and Tobago enjoy many tasty foods. Some popular choices are doubles, roti (often sada roti) with different curried or fried vegetables, and fried bake served with saltfish or meat. Coconut bake (a type of coconut bread) is also a favorite, usually with various fillings.
Doubles are a very popular breakfast food, though you can eat them any time! They are made with two soft, fried pieces of dough called baras filled with curried channa (chickpeas). You can add toppings like pepper sauce, kuchela, and chutneys made from tamarind, mango, pommecythere, or cucumber.
A traditional breakfast with Indian roots often features sada roti. This is a flatbread made from flour, baking powder, and water. It's cooked on a flat, cast-iron pan called a tawa. The roti is cut into pieces and served with fried vegetables, tarkaris, or chokhas. Sometimes, fried bake is eaten instead. This is made with flour, baking powder, and yeast, then fried in oil. Breakfast is often vegetarian, but salt fish is sometimes added.
Some common breakfast dishes include:
- Baigan chokha (roasted and mashed eggplant)
- Damadol chokha (roasted and mashed tomatoes)
- Aloo chokha (boiled, roasted, and mashed potatoes)
- Fried or curried bodi (long beans)
- Fried or curried aloo (potatoes)
- Pumpkin or kohra tarkari (pumpkin cooked with spices)
- Bhaji (made with young dasheen bush leaves or spinach leaves)
- Fried plantains
Fried bake is often served with fried shark, saltfish (dried and salted cod), or buljol (saltfish mixed with fresh sweet peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers). Other options include sardines, herring (smoked, salted, and dried fish), bacon, or corned beef with onions and tomatoes.
Coconut bake (coconut bread) is usually served with fried accra (saltfish fritters), buljol, black pudding, or stewed meats like chicken.
Bake and shark is a very popular breakfast dish, especially at local beaches like Maracas Beach in Trinidad and Store Bay in Tobago, particularly on weekends.
Other breakfast foods include tannia cakes (fried dasheen cake) and boiled cassava with butter. For hot drinks, people often have cocoa tea (hot chocolate) made from homemade cocoa balls, or cornmeal porridge.
Lunch and Dinner
A very famous dish with African roots is callaloo. It's a side dish made from young dasheen or taro leaves, okra (locally called ochro), crab or pigtails, pumpkin, onions, coconut milk, and green seasoning like chives and culantro (called chadon beni).
Callaloo is often served with cornmeal coo coo, plantain, cassava, sweet potatoes, dumplings, rice, and curried crab. This callaloo is different from Jamaican callaloo, which uses amaranth leaves.
Pelau is a very popular rice dish in Trinidad and Tobago. Other favorites include stewed chicken, breadfruit oil down, macaroni pie, ox-tails, and dhal with rice.
Trinidad and Tobago dishes are often curried, stewed, or barbecued. You can find many types of fish and seafood, such as flying fish, king fish, carite, prawns, red fish, shrimp, bonito, lobster, conch, and crab.
One of the most popular Trinidadian dishes is curried duck, served with either roti or rice. Making curried duck is considered an art, and it's seen as a special meal that can be enjoyed anytime.
Macaroni pie is another popular dish. It's a baked macaroni pasta dish with eggs and cheese, and sometimes other ingredients depending on the recipe.
Tobago is especially known for its seafood, like curried crab and dumplings. It's also famous for its "blue food" provisions, which include dasheen (taro root), sweet potato, eddoe, cassava, and yam, often served in soups and stews. "Fish broth," a soup similar to Bouillabaisse, is also very popular.
A rare local delicacy is cascadu (cascadura), a small freshwater fish. It's curried and served with lagoon rice, cassava, and yams. There's a local story that if you eat cascadu, you will always return to Trinidad.
Condiments
Trinidadians love to add different condiments to their meals, often homemade. These include pepper sauces, chutneys, and pickles.
Pepper sauces are made with scotch bonnet or other hot peppers, often mixed with lime or lemon and other vegetables. They come in many flavors. Murtanie (mother-in-law) is another popular spicy condiment made from chopped scotch bonnet peppers, carrots, and karaili (bitter melon).
Chutneys are also popular, made from fruits like mango, tamarind, cucumber, pommecythère, and coconut. They are usually eaten with doubles, aloo pie, and other fried snacks. There are also many popular pickles, known locally as Achar. Kuchela is a spicy grated pickle, usually made from mango.
Green seasoning is very popular. It's a cold sauce made from culantro (chadon beni), pureed with green onions, garlic, pimento, and other herbs. It can be used as a table sauce or to marinate meats.
Street Foods
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You'll find many delicious freshly prepared street foods in Trinidad and Tobago:
- Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian foods like doubles, aloo pie, pholourie, saheena, baiganee, and kachori are very popular. Another favorite is wrap roti, which is a roti (like paratha or dhalpuri) wrapped around curried vegetables, chickpeas and potatoes, or curried meats like chicken, shrimp, or goat. Indian sweets are also popular, especially during Hindu holidays.
- Bake and shark is a fried dish topped with fresh fruit like pineapple, vegetables like cucumber and salad, and various sauces. It's most popular at Maracas Beach.
- Souse is made from pig, cow, or chicken feet, or even cucumbers. It's seasoned with onion, garlic, salt, peppers, and lemon. It's usually served warm.
Other common street foods include wontons, corn soup, geera (cumin) pork, kebabs, gyros, pasteles, and raw oysters. You can also find fish pies, macaroni pies, cheese pies, and beef pies. Pows are steamed buns filled with meat, often char siu pork. Sausage rolls are also popular snacks.
When in season, you can find roasted or boiled corn on the cob day or night. During special events like Carnival, you might find wild meats like deer, iguana, or armadillo, prepared as a creole or curry dish with local pepper sauces.
On hot days, people enjoy ice cream, snow cones (shaved ice with flavored syrup, often with condensed milk), ice pops, kulfi, coconut water, and fresh coconut jelly.
Festival Foods
For Christmas, special foods include appetizers like pastelles (similar to Venezuelan hallaca), pholourie, and chicken or pork pies. Main dishes often feature garlic ham, baked ham, baked turkey or chicken, macaroni pie, fish pie, roasted potatoes, and various curries (chicken, goat, duck, fish, shrimp). Desserts include fruitcake, blackcake (rum cake), sweet bread, and cassava pone. Popular drinks are ginger beer, ponche crema, and sorrel.
Traditional Diwali and other Hindu festivals feature appetizers like pholourie, saheena, and kachori. Main dishes include roti (especially dalpuri and paratha) and karhi with rice. These are served with condiments like achar, kuchela, and pepper sauce. Vegetarian curries are common, such as curried mango, bhaji (dasheen bush or spinach), pumpkin, and curry channa and aloo (chickpeas and potatoes). Desserts include mohan bhog, lapsi, burfi, khurma, gulab jamun, and jalebi. Meals are often served on a sohari leaf.
For Eid, Hosay, and other Muslim festivals, foods include curry goat, curry channa and aloo, sawine, burfi, rasgulla, and halwa.
Sweets
Local desserts are usually very sweet! Popular snacks include cassava or coconut pone, stewed guavas, sweetbread, tamarind balls, bene balls, toolum, and sugar cakes. You can also find local chocolates and candies.
Many Indian delicacies are also popular, such as kheer (sweet rice), sawiyan, khurma, gulab jamoon, laddu, jalebi, halwa, mohan bhog, rasgula, and burfi.
Beverages
Trinidad and Tobago has many popular drinks. These include various sweet sodas like Chubby's, Busta, Solo, Peardrax, and popular international brands. Other drinks include Malta, Shandy, ginger beer, peanut punch, sorrel, mauby, seamoss punch, soursop punch, and paw paw punch.
Local beers like Carib and Stag are very popular. There are also Carib Light and Carib Shandys in flavors like Sorrel, Ginger, and Lime.
Coconut water is widely available. Since rum was invented in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago has many places selling local rums like puncheon rum and homemade fruit wines.
Pacro water is a seafood-based drink made by boiling various chiton mollusks. It's believed to have health benefits and can sometimes be found at festivals.
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Fruits
Trinidad offers a wide variety of fruits, including many types of mangoes (like Julie, Bombay, and Ice Cream), breadfruit, sorrel (roselle), passion fruit, watermelons, sapodilla, pommerac, guavas, pommecythère (Spondias dulcis), caimite (star apple), five fingers (carambola), cherries, zaboca (avocado), popoy (papaya), chenette, pineapples, oranges, and different types of plums. You'll also find West Indian cherries, bananas, soursop, cashews, tamarind, and various types of coconuts.
Many fruits in Trinidad and Tobago are used to make a savory and spicy treat called "chow". The main ingredients for chow are the fruit, culantro (bandhaniya), pepper, salt, and sometimes garlic and vinegar. The most popular fruits for chow are mangoes, pommeracs, pommecythères, cucumbers, tomatoes, cherries, pineapples, green apples, and plums. The fruits are cut into bite-sized pieces and mixed with the other ingredients.
