DR Food Breakdown: Entry 1: Yucca Balls & Yaha

I am currently watching an SNL marathon. One just finished that was from like 2002… they kept talking about SARS… Avril Lavigne was on and singing a song that I remember hearing at a school dance in 7th grade… and Tracy Morgan was there too- and skinny. How times have changed.

Anyway, I’m not writing to ramble about SNL… nor am I writing to rant about France (while I’d like to… maldita visa).

No, this entry is the first- of hopefully many- entries on the food of the Dominican Republic. Okay, maybe I should’ve started this earlier than two weeks before I was to leave… whatever.

Today we are going to talk about… Yucca Balls and Yaha.

This is a yucca ball. Yucca is kind of like a potato, but not. It’s a tuber. I think that’s the word for it. Anyway, a yucca ball is… a ball of mashed up yucca that’s filled with something, rolled in bread crumbs, and then deep-fried. I think they’re usually 25-35 pesos (.67-.94), which is probably about 5 times cheaper than what they’d cost if they were sold in the States. Normal.


This is a photo of a yucca ball my host brother had a bit ago… this one is filled with cheese. Yucca balls are normally a little bit smaller than baseballs.

And of course they’re amazing, but I’ve only had one or two… there are just so many delicious fried foods here, and I try not to have more than two a week… I normally stick to empanadas (more on those some other time) or… YAHA.

What is yaha? I may or may not have discussed it before… but it is most definitely worth a second shout out.


This is what it looks like from the outside.

They’re usually about 5 inches long, deep fried, and they always have some combo of red dots on the outside. These dots, and the ones on empanadas, show what type of filling you’re going to find inside. There’re only a few types of yaha, but like a million types of empanadas- or like twenty- so it gets pretty complicated.

This was a chicken and cheese yaha. Not the greatest photo, but you can kinda see the chicken in there. It’s shredded chicken, and cheese like you’d find in a mozzarella stick. There are two other flavors that I know of too- plain cheese, and pizza. I had pizza for the first time today. Mmm mmmm…


Inside

So, pretty much, Deep fried egg roll like crust + mozzarella stick cheese + chicken = yaha

Anyone want me to try to bring them up one from the DR?

Just kidding, that’s a silly question. There’s no way it’d even make it to the airport without me eating it first.

** Yucca ball recipe **