Food: A Very Special Dessert Edition

Dominicans love sweet food.  There are vendors selling gum and candy on every street corner.  People put, on average, two to three heaping tablespoons of sugar in every half-full cup of coffee, drink fruit juices with plenty of added sweetener at every meal, and think we're crazy for drinking plain chamomile tea at night.  (My friend's host brother, in fact, once snuck some honey into her tea behind her back because he was so sure it'd be gross without it.)  Two of the most popular snacks are Oreos and their Dominican counterpart, Dinos.  One would think that this love of all things sweetened would translate into a delicious selection of Dominican desserts.  Let's test that hypothesis...

Higos

These are stewed figs.  (The photo is actually from Google, but the ones I ate looked just like this.)  This was the first dessert I had in this country, as it is the favorite food of my host brother who was visiting for Christmas and New Year's.  My host mom makes it by putting figs, water, and sugar together in a saucepan and simmering them until they get mushy and dense.

The verdict: This can only be described as sickly sweet.  When my host mom tried to make them again a few days later but burned them, she and Braulio were disappointed.  I tried to express my condolences tactfully, but, secretly, my taste buds were rejoicing that they would be sparred from having to eat any more of them to be polite.  

Dulce de Leche y Coco

This is a Dominican candy sold both in grocery stores and on street corners, wrapped in plastic, ready to be sliced and eaten.  This one is plain milk and coconut, but some of them come with a fruit-jelly-like filling.

The verdict: This is nothing like the caramel-like dulce de leche that comes from Argentina.  Instead, it has the consistency of a slightly drier, grainier fudge, and none of the deliciousness.  It's possibly the most bland candy I've ever eaten - it's not sickly sweet, but it's also not sweet, period.  Nor can I describe it as having any other flavor.  It doesn't even taste like coconut.

[As a side note, the other most popular options in the candy aisle of Dominican grocery stores are suckers (which are generally good), Halls cough drops (which are enormously popular and eaten as mints), gum (lots of Orbit and Trident), and circus peanuts (which, for some reason, seem to be the most popular kind of imported candy.  Every grocery store I've been to has had racks and racks of them for sale.).   

The verdict:  The most popular candies include cough drops and circus peanuts.  Enough said.]

Arroz con Leche

This is like a slightly more soupy version rice pudding - rice cooked with milk, sugar, vanilla, raisins, and a cinnamon stick, then sprinkled with a dash of powdered cinnamon.

The verdict:  Very, very tasty.  Probably the best dessert in the country. 

Bubble Tea

A few weeks ago, I was in a mall, walking around the food court, when I suddenly came face to face with a sign with a picture of bubble tea.  My heart soared.  Never, in my wildest dreams, had I imagined I would find bubble tea in Santiago.  (Although, fun fact:  The tapioca pearls in bubble tea are actually made out of...the starch of yuca, after it's been grated and had the liquid pressed out of it.)  I ordered one right away, and you can see the joy and excitement in my face as I wait for it.  There was a lot of joy and excitement.

The verdict: Heartbreak.  As Joe pointed out, I was a fool to suspect that Dominicans, who make stir fry with raisins, would make a good Asian drink.  The pearls were not the sweet, round, chewy delights from Tea Garden - they were a bitter, squishy mass of grossness.  The actual tea part was quite good, but I couldn't drink it without getting more of those bitter chunks of tapioca, so the drink as a whole was heartbreakingly awful.

Honeycomb

Someone gave my host mom this all-natural, straight-from-the-country honeycomb as a gift.  It was just a huge slab of wax dripping with fresh honey, and we kept it in our fridge for about a week.  Any time you wanted a little bit of something sweet, you could just cut yourself off a piece, chew it so the honey would ooze out, and spit out the wax that remained (kind of like those wax bottle candies).  

The verdict: I actually liked this a lot.  The honey was delicious.  The only bad part was that sometimes little pieces of crumbly wax would get stuck behind your teeth, like popcorn kernels.

Habichuelas con Dulce

You make this concoction by blending beans with milk, cinnamon, and sugar until it's a smooth, brownish liquid.  You then add some chopped up pieces of batatas (those blueish sweet potatoes) and let it simmer.  Yep.  It's a dessert whose main ingredients are sweet potatoes and beans.

The verdict: I think it's no coincidence that this is almost always made during Lent, the time of fasting and self-denial.

So, while I'm sure I'll end up missing some of the foods here, like passion fruit and mangú, I can't say I'll miss a lot in the way of Dominican sweets.