Classic Dominican Lunch

Jackpot. A meal that's totally easy, healthy, exciting and delicious. Thanks to my new neighbor, Angel Ferreras, and his family and friends for passing along to us how to make this wonderful food. All together, this combination of rice, beans and meat is called la bandera, or the flag, because it's ubiquitous in the Dominican Republic. See below posts for the recipes, how-to-photos and video, and the story.

The Recipes

Classic Dominican Lunch
La bandera (the flag) is a plate of rice, beans, meat, and tostones

As Angel Ferreras from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, taught Lindsay Sterling in Freeport, Maine, July 2012

Serves 6
Cooking Time: 1 hr

Beans

2 tsp vegetable oil
1 tsp salt
2 cups water
1/4 tsp Adobo seasoning (main ingredients: salt, turmeric, garlic powder)

1/4 green pepper, cut into 1/2" chunks

1 slice red onion, sliced into thirds (small segments)

1 tsp oregano

1 can pinto beans, drained (black, white, pink, or red work, too) 

4 oz. tomato sauce

2 Tbsp fresh cilantro leaves

Put all the ingredients in a medium sauce pot. Bring up to a boil, then simmer for 20-30 minutes. Serve beans and sauce in a bowl family style on the table, with white rice, meat, and tostones. Angel put the rice on his plate, then spooned beans including sauce on top of his rice.

Rice

2 cups rice

2 tsp vegetable oil 

2 tsp salt

You can cook white rice however you like. He had a particular way of doing it that produced a crispy layer of rice on the bottom of the pan which is a delicacy served separately called concon. (Accent on the second o). Bring 1 quart of water to a boil with vegetable oil and salt in a large, heavy bottom pot with lid. In a separate bowl cover the rice with water by a couple inches. Drain rice in a mesh strainer. Repeat two more times. Add drained rice to the boiling water, stirring with a wooden spoon. After five minutes or so, when spoon stays standing up in the cooking rice, cover the pot with tinfoil and a lid. After ten minutes, turn the rice so the rice that was on top is on the bottom and recover. Cook another ten minutes. Serve the fluffy rice in one bowl and the cocon - the crispy rice at the bottom - in a separate dish.

Tostones

3 green plantains
about 2 cups vegetable oil
salt

Cut off the ends of the plantains, then puncture the skin, running the tip of a paring knife through through one of the ridges and flush with the flesh inside. Then wedge your fingers in the incision between the skin and the flesh, and pop the peel off the flesh. Continue doing this around the plantain until all the skin is off, making more incisions if you need to with the knife. Use the back of your knife to scrape any remaining bits of peel off the plantain. Cut across the plantain so you have 5 or 6  1 " thick cylinders. Heat 1/2 inch deep vegetable oil in a heavy bottomed saute pan. Fry both sides of the plantains for about 5 minutes until the pale yellow color turns darker yellow, but not brown. Put on a paper towel lined plate or try. Then smash each piece with the bottom of a glass or a little press called a tostonera so the plantains flattened into discs. Fry these again until bubbles slow down. Sprinkle with salt and serve.

Meat

La bandera includes some kind of meat, often times stewed beef called carne guisada. That night, his girlfriend and son made kabobs. Do anything you'd like. Here is a great recipe for the stewed beef that I have adapted from a Dominican cooking site and cooked many times to rave reviews.

Dominican Stewed Beef

Serves 6

2 1/2 pounds stew beef

2 Tbsp soy sauce

2 Tbsp sazon marinade*

1 tsp pepper  

4 cloves garlic, mashed into a paste

pinch cinnamon

¼ cup olive oil

3-4 cups hot water

¼ cup chopped cilantro

2 Tbsp tomato paste

salt to taste

Mix soy sauce, sazon, pepper, garlic and cinnamon. Coat meat evenly with this mixture by massaging with hands. Cover and let marinate in fridge for 1-6 hours. Heat oil in heavy bottomed large pot (with lid) or pressure cooker pot, add meat, cilantro and water as necessary (to stew the meat and leave a little sauce once the meat is tender). When the meat is tender, add tomato paste, and cook for five minutes more. Taste and add salt if necessary.

*“Sazon” marinade:

1/2 head garlic

1 onions

1 bell pepper

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1/2 chicken bouillon cub

1 Tbsp oregano

1/8 tsp allspice

1/2 Tbsp achiote powder

1/2 Tbsp olives

1/2 Tbsp capers

1/4 tsp salt

1 Tbsp vinegar

1/4 cup water only if needed

Cut all the large ingredients into cubes and blend in a blender. Add small amounts of water to help the blender get moving if necessary. Store in ziplock bags in the freezer for handy use as marinades, or to flavor rice dishes. This may also be known as sofrito.

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2012

The Story

We’re making Dominican Food

Come on Over!

By Lindsay Sterling

In August, Angel Ferreras, 39, did what any Dominican would do. I was looking for his neighbor who wasn’t home, and he invited me over for dinner. He didn’t know me. It wasn’t a special occasion. But as he explains, “In Dominican, everybody is like family.” You wave over anyone you see in the neighborhood and hang out together.

“What are we having?” I asked. His teenage daughter, Pamela, responded, in English and in Spanish: “Vamos a comer la bandera.” The dish name translates to “the flag” and consists of rice, beans and meat with twice-fried plantains, called tostones, on the side. Dominicans eat la bandera so often that it apparently defines the country as much as the flag.

In his kitchen Angel (pronounced AHN hell) covers 1 cup of red pre-cooked beans with water in a small pot. He adds 1 tablespoon diced green pepper, 1 tablespoon sliced red onion, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 shakes of Goya Adobo seasoning, and 1 teaspoon oregano powder. When the water starts to boil he adds 4 ounces tomato sauce and 2 tablespoons fresh chopped cilantro and cooks the mixture for thirty minutes. The green plantains look like giant green bananas. He peels the skins off the hard, cream-colored flesh with a knife, slices the flesh into medallions, and shallow-fries them on medium heat until they turn sunflower yellow.

Then his American girlfriend, Robin Hetzler, got out a tostonera, a wooden contraption for smashing the fried plantain rounds into flatter circles. After she smashed the medallions, she passed them to Angel who fried them again. He served the beans in their cooking liquid on top of the white rice along with the tostones, and meat, which tonight was his girlfriend’s shish kabobs marinated in sofrito, garlic, vinegar and oil, then grilled. My whole family agreed when I made this meal for them at home that la bandera was delicious -- a keeper, and especially beloved by me because it’s so easy to make. My kids said the tostones were almost as good as French fries. 

I couldn’t have selected a more perfect dish to make as Columbus Day approaches, because Columbus’s first permanent settlement was actually on Hispaniola, the very same island where la bandera is cooked five hundred years later. The natives weren’t cooking it when Columbus arrived because they had never experienced rice, cilantro, oregano, plantains, or garlic. The Spanish weren’t cooking it before he arrived because they had never experienced the wonders of green peppers, tomatoes, or these bean varieties. It was only after his voyages that knowledge of these tasty edible plants and sources of energy was shared.

I always feel uncomfortable on Columbus Day because the celebration completely ignores the tragic reality of what happened, leaving unacknowledged the sorrow and loss of hundreds of thousands of native people as both a direct and indirect result of his voyages. On that island alone, in just 15 years after Columbus arrived, the estimated initial population of 250,000 Arawak natives fell to just 14,000. And this is not mention that we’re celebrating a man who was bull-headed and wrong about pretty much everything. (This wasn’t a New World. People had been living there for thousands of years thank you very much. And this isn’t India!) What we all can celebrate together is that in 1492 for the first time in human history, for better or for worse, we started becoming one world. Lets celebrate the best of our togetherness. Change Columbus Day to One World Day and make la bandera.

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2012

See how to do it

Dominican La Bandera

The beans start with water, salt, a little green pepper and red onion, a couple sakes of Adobo seasoning (really just garlic powder, oregano, salt and a little turmeric).

Angel's family cooks the rice a special way to get a crusty bottom called concon, a delicacy.  My Puerto Rican friend did this, too. The gist (I have a feeling this will take me a while to get just right) is to cook the rice (salt and a little oil, too) with the lid off, stirring occasionally, until much of the water evaporates. Angel said he puts the lid on only when the spoon stands upright in the rice. Then he covers the opening with tinfoil and a lid, cooks it on low for ten minutes, then flips most of the rice over, leaving grains stuck to the bottom of the pan, covers the pan again, and cooks for another 10 minutes. Then you serve the fluffy rice in one dish, and the wondefully crunchy concon (cone CONE), in a separate dish.

Oh, and they rinsed the rice first - three times covering it with water and straining. In this next photo, his daughter is adding the rice to the salted, oil-ed water.

Angel and his daughter cooking la bandera.

Here's the concon.

When the bean water boils, you add tomato sauce and the beans, and cook for thirty minutes. You serve the beans with the flavored cooking water like a sauce.  Delicious!

Here's Angel, frying the plantains. Click at right to see the video of how he does it - so easy!

 La bandera (the flag) includes rice, beans, and meat. Here's Angel's son and girlfriend, contributing the kabobs, which Angel described as an American-Dominican thing.

Here is the whole meal together. It's so wonderful to have all these different flavors and textures on the table. Love it! I think tostones are better than French fries. My kids weighed in, "Almost."