Maracas Bay, Trinidad. Wesley spent a week with three different vendors learning the batter. Notes from the trip.
Maracas Bay is about an hour from Port of Spain if the traffic is good, which it never is on a Sunday. The road winds through the Northern Range, drops steeply to the coast, and the first thing you smell before you see the bay is the bake frying.
There are maybe fifteen vendors on the beach. Some have been there for thirty years. Some are second generation. The bake – a round of fried dough, crisp outside, soft inside – is the carrier. The shark is the filling. How you season the shark, and what you put on top of it, is where the arguments start.
What We Learned
We spent five days eating our way through every vendor on the beach. Some things we already knew. Some things surprised us. The biggest surprise was the coleslaw – every vendor made it slightly differently, and the balance of sweetness and acid changed the whole dish.
Our version is now a hybrid of two vendors who we are not going to name because we do not want to start trouble. The batter is our own. The tamarind sauce is Wesley’s grandmother’s recipe, unchanged.