Meat scrapings and fried sweet potato

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This is a true jewel of dominican cooking.

Because of the obssesion with fat in today’s eating world, these kind of traditions have been progressively lost.

Meat scrapings, as something that you don’t do every day, is totally acceptable. Granted, it will have a much higher sodium content as it is salty; it will be higher in fat, but nothing a healthy person can’t enjoy, especially because it’s not something you do every day and…let’s be honest, this is amazingly delicious!

fried sweet potatoes with meat scrapings

Ok. So, what’s the deal with meat scrapings?

The “history of meat scrapings”

In the Dominican countryside since times as far back as we can remember dishes like stewed chicken meat, stewed beef and chicharrón (pork or chicken cracklings) have been very common.

These dishes, generally leave a residue in the bottom of the pot, a scraping or “zurrapa”, which is why Dominicans LOVE the bottom of the pot.

A large spoon is used to scrape the bottom of the pot and then eat it with Dominican “viveres” (tubers, starchy roots like yuca and musaceae)

In the picture, we fried some Dominican sweet potatoes (slightly different from American sweet potatoes)