This week we are back in the Caribbean as we pay a visit to the Bahamas. To get more acquainted with Bahamian cuisine, we make a vegan conch salad, a ceviche-style dish popular throughout the islands. This post is a bit of an outlier on this blog as my wife and I had the fortune of visiting a friend in the Bahamas a few weeks back. During our trip, we had the chance to try a conch-less conch salad made by one of the many street food vendors along Arawak Cay in Nassau. Now I get to try and replicate their work in this post. Read on to learn more about Bahamian cuisine and conch salad or jump straight to the recipe.

Short Bahamian history

The Bahamas is a country consisting of some 700 islands off the coast of Florida ​[1]​. Prior to Columbus’ first visit, the region was home to different American Indigenous peoples, including the Lucayans who were later enslaved by the Spanish and moved to other islands where they were killed off. The Bahamas, and in particular the capital of Nassau, became important during the Golden Age of Piracy in the late 17th century until Brittain had enough and clamped down on Piracy, incorporating the Bahamas more firmly into their empire ​[2]​. To make the Bahamas profitable, a large number of enslaved people were moved to the islands from West Africa and forced to work in various industries. The country gained its independence in 1973 but remains part of the British Commonwealth.

Bahamian cuisine

The cuisine of the Bahamas is influenced by the nation’s geography and history ​[3]​. Being an archipelago, seafood is very common and is joined by a few land animals, in particular chicken. The vast majority of Bahamas’ 400,000 population are descendants of formerly enslaved people of West African descent. Hence, many dishes have West African origins and influences. Some of the more unique Bahamian dishes are based around ingredients the former colonial masters allowed the enslaved persons to eat, such as pig’s feet and sheep tongue. Fresh produce is also abundant and many dishes include bell pepper, peppers, onion, and tomato. You will find tropical ingredients like mango, avocado, oranges, breadfruit, plantain, and coconut growing everywhere and being enjoyed to a great extent ​[3]​.

Bahamian dishes

Among the Bahamian dishes, you can spot the West African origin in meals like peas and rice, fried plantain, peas soup with dumplings, and fritters (deep-fried doughy balls) ​[3], [4]​. Seafood is cooked in any number of ways, from grilled, to fried to boiled. On the dessert table, you can find rum cake (a dense sponge cake drenched in rum), bread pudding (old bread given new life as a spiced cake), coconut tart, and guava duff, a boiled cake roll filled with guava cream ​[5]​.

The indigenous Lucayans left the country with Johnnycake, a cornmeal flatbread cooked in a frying pan. Johnnycake in one form or another was eaten by North American Indigenous peoples all along the Atlantic coast, from modern-day Canada down to Jamaica. The bread is still enjoyed today, in one way or another, such as the classic cornbread in the US South ​[6]​. In the Bahamas, the recipe for Johnny Cake has drifted away from the corn meal still in use in many other parts of the Caribbean in favour of wheat flour. Johnny Cake is often served for breakfast with souse, a thin soup usually with chicken or sheep’s tongue, carrots, potatoes, allspice, and peppers ​[4]​.

One very unique and important ingredient that stands out in Bahamian cuisine is the queen conch, a large sea snail. An ingredient enjoyed by the Lucayan indigenous people and, according to one of our guides during our trip, one of the ingredients the enslaved people were allowed to eat, as the colonial masters did not find it palatable. Today, queen conch is enjoyed in many different dishes in the Bahamas, such as conch salad.

Conch salad

Queen conch (pronounced with a hard k at the end, like “konk“), is a large sea snail famous for its magnificent shell (see for instance Lord of the Flies). Conch has been on the menu since pre-Columbian days when the indigenous Lucayans would eat the snail and use its shell for various purposes, such as tools and ornaments ​[7]​. Conch is also an example of an ingredient the British colonists did not find palatable and left for the enslaved people to eat, along with offal such as sheep’s tongue. The queen conch is facing survival issues due to overfishing and habitat loss from environmental change and hurricanes and is slowly dying out in most parts of the world. The snail still appears abundant in the Bahamas for now and different initiatives are underway to help ensure the conch doesn’t vanish from the Bahamas as well ​[8]–[10]​.

As a dish, conch is often turned into deep-fried conch fritters or deep-fried whole and served as “cracked conch” ​[7], [11]​. The most popular way to serve it is as conch salad ​[7], [11]​. If you have the fortune of visiting the Bahamas you will find vendors along popular streets frantically chopping up conch and vegetables, scooping it up into a plastic bin and drenching it in citrus juice before handing the salad to the long line of waiting customers.

Conch salad is a type of ceviche

Conch salad is a type of ceviche, where raw seafood is cooked with a low pH instead of heat ​[12]​. The low pH disrupts the proteins causing them to denature and clump up, just as they do during heat treatment. This is the same way tofu can be made using lemon juice and soy milk, as I described in a previous post (Protons, proteins and tofu – vegan food chemistry). While the proteins do get cooked this way, low pH is not nearly as effective as heat at killing bacteria and parasites so eating ceviche-style food can be risky and the fish is often frozen to kill parasites ​[13]​. If you follow a plant-based diet, this is one less thing you have to worry about. And you help preserve the queen conch population as well!

In conch salad, the low pH used to cook the snail is achieved by adding copious amounts of juice from lime and bitter or sour orange which additionally adds a lot of citrus flavour. In addition to citrus juice and conch, the salad also contains onion, tomato and green bell pepper ​[7], [11], [14]​. Often a few bits of finely chopped goat pepper or scotch bonnet are used to add some heat. Some recipes also add a bit of cucumber ​[15]​, celery ​[16]​, or red bell pepper ​[17]​. One popular variation introduces mango and pineapple as well, for a tropical conch salad variation ​[14], [15]​.

How to make vegan conch salad

To prepare a vegan conch salad, you have several options. A simple one is to simply omit the conch itself and just make a basic conch-less salad. If you do, the tropical version with pineapple and mango is extra appealing. (This is what I ordered during our trip to Nassau.) You can also look to replace the conch with something of a similar texture or flavor. One popular option I found online is to roast king oyster mushrooms to create a chewy texture and then marinate the diced mushrooms with seaweed overnight ​[18]–[20]​. Instead of mushrooms, you can use baked tofu for a similar texture ​​[21]​​. Looking at vegan ceviche recipes ​[22]​​, you can find other seafood alternatives for this type of dish, such as heart of palm ​​[23]​​, avocado ​​[24]​​, and cauliflower ​[25]​.

Young coconut as a vegan conch substitute

For this vegan conch salad, I decided to use young coconut to replace the main ingredient. Our friend suggested this after having had conch-less conch salad with young coconut at one of Nassau’s many conch salad places. (Later, I also found another blogger who used young coconut for their vegan ceviche ​[26]​.) Apart from having a tough but soft texture similar to conch (I’m told), young coconut is an ingredient common in the Bahamas. When walking around in the hot weather, you can often find someone selling young coconuts as a mineral-rich beverage. After drinking the water, you can scoop out the jelly for an energy-rich snack or you can buy a bag of just the flesh to snack on.

If you don’t live in the tropics, you may be able to find fresh young coconut whole at an Asian grocery store. Crack it open and scoop out the jelly yourself. Or check the freezer section in the same store, you may be able to find a frozen bag of shredded young coconut flesh (pictured here). This is what I used for this dish.

Conclusion

Creating this vegan conch salad back home in Vancouver after our trip to the Bahamas has been really fun. For once, I had the fortune of visiting the country I am writing about and trying a local, vegan rendition of the dish. This adds a lot to the experience but also a bit of pressure in writing about the cuisine and the dish. There is so much I want to capture while keeping the post on topic and to a manageable length. In the end, this vegan conch salad turned out really well. It is a great dish to eat on a hot summer day, basically a savory, fruit salad full of refreshing citrus and a bit of heat. Do try this dish next time you plan an outing to the beach!

Vegan conch salad recipe

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Vegan conch salad

This Bahamian vegan conch salad replaces the traditional conch with young coconut to achieve a similar texture using Bahamian ingredients.

Course Side Dish, street food

Cuisine Bahamian, Caribbean

Keyword salad

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Servings 1 large

Ingredients

• 220 g Tomato
• 90 g Green bell pepper
• 70 g Onion
• 200 g young coconut see note
• Scotch bonnet to taste
• 3 tbsp fresh lime juice
• 3 tbsp bitter orange juice see note
• salt to taste ~½ tsp

Instructions

• Prepare the young coconut if needed. See note.
• Chop all the vegetables finely: tomatoes and bell pepper to ~5 mm cubes, onion down to ~3 mm cubes. Transfer to a bowl
• Chop the young coconut into ~5 mm pieces. Add to bowl.
• If using: finely chop as much habanero as you like. Transfer to the bowl.
• Add salt to taste, ~½ tsp.
• Squeeze the limes and bitter oranges, adding their juice to the salad. You need a lot of juice, ~3 tbsp of each.
• Serve straight away, either as a standalone dish or as a side. Or pack it up and bring on an outing to the beach.

  The vegan conch-less salad keeps in the fridge for 1-2 days.

Notes

Young coconut: Sometimes you can find young coconut fresh and cut it open and scrape out the tender flesh. You can also find shredded young coconut in the frozen section in some stores. For this dish, I found some in the freezer at my local Chinese store. The bag said to heat the coconut flesh to 75 °C so I did before letting it cool down again. (Most likely a bacterial safety concern.)

Bitter orange: bitter orange can also be hard to find. Here I substituted it for blood orange. If your orange is very sweet, use a little less of orange juice and a bit more of lime juice.

 

References