How To Cook Jamaican Hard Food?

Boiled hard food, easy to make, is very filling and goes when well with most traditional Jamaican main dishes. Yellow yam, green banana, pumpkin, ripe plantain and flour dumpling boiled in salted water.

What is Jamaican Hard Food

Hard food is ground provisions such as yam, green banana, plantain, potato, pumpkin, dasheen root, cassava, breadfruit, cho cho and boiled dumpling.

In Jamaican culinary hard food is boiled in salted water and eaten as a side dish or cooked in soup.

In the recipe below, the hard food is cooked on it own and I am cooking the most commonly cooked hard food use in Jamaican culinary.

Hard Food Recipe

Here are the hard food that I am using for this recipe.

A piece of pumpkin, yellow, yam, green banana and ripe plantain and plain flour for the dumplings. These are the most commonly cooked hard food.

How To Cook It Jamaican Hard Food

Hard food is very easy to make. You are basically boiling the ground provisions and dumplings. I will also share with a few tips as I go along that will help to get the perfect hard food.

Make the dumpling dough first and add them to the pot first. The reason is that no matter how long you boil the dumplings they will not break apart.

There are two variations of boiled dumplings. The first one is made just with plain flour mixed with water. The second is to add a little bit of cornmeal to the flour before making the dumpling dough.

Some people add a pinch of salt to the dumpling mix, I don’t ever add salt to my boiled dumpling but if you like your food with a bit more salt you may way to add some to the dumpling mix.

Peeling the yellow yam and the banana can be a little bit tricky. The peeled yellow yam which cause you to itch if it touches your skin. Surprisingly, it does itch the palm of your hands.

It can be a bit hard to remove the skin from the green banana so I would recommend cooking it with the skin if you have never peeled a green banana. Just cook off both ends of the banana and cut the skin down the middle.

Also, if you are not adding the yam and banana straight to the pot after you peeled them make sure to soak them in cold water to stop them going brown.

Cook the plantain with its skin because the ripe plantain is very soft and absorbs too much of the water if cooked without.

A great way to prevent the plantain sucks up to much water if the use a vegetable steamer basket. I use this especially when the plantain is very ripe.

What To Serve With Hard Food

Hard food is served with many traditional Jamaican main dishes. Rundown (rundung) is served mostly with hard food mainly for breakfast.

Brown stew fish and brown stew chicken are commonly serve with hard food. Curry chicken and curry goat are also served with hard food.

Ackee and saltfood, callaloo and saltfish, steamed cabbage go well in with hard food.

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