Dominican callaloo soup recipe
Since this month is Creole Month in Dominica, I wanted to prepare a lovely Dominican callaloo soup, which is currently the national dish of Dominica. It’s a soup that brings back wonderful childhood memories of my mother preparing it with passion and love . I featured this delicious soup on another post. I offered lots of information about how it’s prepared. See blog post here.
For this recipe, I used crabs instead of salted or smoked pork. In Dominica, we use a crab commonly referred to cirique, which is often found in many of our 365 rivers. They are brown and yellow in color, with sharp pinchers. Even though this may be the preferred crab, other crabs on the island can substitute for cirique, in this Dominican callaloo soup recipe. Here’s a list of them. Since I live in San Francisco Area, I used our famous dungeness crabs. I purchased them live at my local seafood market and boiled them in a large pot with salt, water, and a little garlic.
As I’ve mentioned in my previous post , you can enjoy callaloo soup by itself, with bread, rice, or provisions like green bananas, dasheen, breadfruit and plantains.
Dominican callaloo soup recipe
Ingredients
- 2 lbs young dasheen or tannia leaves, you can also use spinach
- 3 large crabs
- 1 cup coconut milk use a can of coconut milk if you can't find a shelled coconut
- 1 large onion
- 1 tbsp oil
- 5 cups water
- 1 tbsp celery chopped
- 1 tbsp thyme chopped
- 4 blades Chive
- 1 hot pepper
- 2 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- 1½ tbsp turmeric
- 10 small dumplings a dough made with flour, salt and water
Instructions
- Boil crabs in a large pot with some salt and a little garlic
- Remove crab backs and clean crabs
- Separate legs, pinchers and ribs to later add to soup
- Wash and peel outer skin from dasheen or tannia leaves
- Chop the leaves and boil in 3 cups of water add a 1/2 tablespoon of salt
- If using spinach wash and chop leaves
- Chop onion, chive and garlic
- Add oil to a large pot on medium heat
- Stir in onion, celery and garlic to heated oil, saute for 3 minutes
- Pour in coconut milk and rest of water in the pot
- Add dasheen, tannia leaves or spinach leaves
- Use a handheld (immersion blender) and pulse leaves mixture in the pot for about 15 seconds)
- Add thyme and hot pepper
- Add dumplings
- Add boiled crabs
- Season with the remainder of the salt and black pepper
- Cover pot and let simmer for about 45 minutes.
- Once cooked it can be served by itself, with white rice or bread
Food heaven!
Hi Troy,
Thank you!
I am salivating and anxious to try this. One of my favorite dishes my mom prepares when I visit home. Her callaloo is next level. I have never purchased live crabs and do not think I will start now 😁. But ny fish market does have crab parts for sale and doesn’t move lolol. Hmmm where to find the dasheen leaf though. Its NYC so I KNOW it has to be available somewhere. Thanks Mayma.
Hi Hyacinth,
Yes please try this recipe. You can get lots of goodies from your local Asian market :-).There you will definitely find taro leaves. You may also find callaloo leaves. Try Vietnamese or Filipino, you stand a great chance of getting dasheen leaves (taro). Taro leaves are even sold at the Mexican supermarkets as well. If you’re unable to find it in your area, use spinach. It a great substitute.