A Taste of the World

Well, I promised a recipe for these, and while it’s not the recipe that Christine learned, it is still a home-made recipe. This comes from Concinando con Carmen, a collection of Peruvian recipes sold by the Cuzco branch of South American Explorers and provided by their resident chef who does their awesome food nights. It makes eight servings.

Papas Rellenas

1.5 kg white potatoes

3 eggs

Pinch of pepper

1 tbsp of salt

1/4 c oil (for browning)

3 tbsp oil for filling

1/2 c chopped onions

1 c peeled and chopped tomatoes

Pinch of cumin and salt to taste

4 cloves garlic

1/4 c grated cheese

1/4 c olives

flour

1. Boil the potatoes. Once they are cooked, peel them and mash them in a bowl. Add an egg, salt and pepper and mix well with a fork.

2. Put the 3 tbsp of oil into a pan and fry the onions, garlic, cumin, and salt. Add the tomatoes and cook for 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and add the olives and cheese.

3. Fill the potatoes and cover them in flour. To fry them, heat the oil and fry the potatoes until they are golden.

4. Serve with rice or salad.

Something that can be found all over Bolivia (and, as it turns out, a lot of the rest of South America) is the idea of a set lunch. For between one and two dollars, you can sit down and have a full lunch (or dinner, sometimes, though lunches are much easier to find). You start with a big bowl of soup, usually sometimes relatively simple but filling like quinoa soup or peanut soup or soup with noodles or something like that, then move on to the segundo, or main dish. Options can vary from one single dish to a variety of choices. Again, they’re made to be filling - a lunch can be soup with noodles followed by meatballs and onions over potatoes and rice, as in this picture (three carbs!) - and they definitely achieve that. Chris often ordered only the soup or the segundo despite the fact that they were almost the same price together or apart, as both were just too much for her in one sitting.

Sometimes you could get simple, non-complex dishes like roast chicken or a slice of beef or delicious sausage if you didn’t feel like delving into unknown dishes, but other times you could still sample regional fare rather cheaply. I tried tongue one afternoon and Chris grew to like saice at the end of our time in Sucre.

However you cut it, set lunches are a fabulous and cheap way of eating like the locals and also a great way to try dishes out that might cost you four or five times as much a la carta.

Food in Bolivia is an exercise in being full. There is a lot of rice or noodles to start the carbohydrate family. There are lots of potatoes, many kinds of potatoes, some extremely delicious, some extremely dry, no matter how long you cook them. And there is some kind of meat. Sometimes you get a little onion salad. That pretty much makes up a Bolivian dish.

That is not to say Bolivian food is boring all the time. While there are times it can be, there was plenty for us to discover when we crossed the border. Having been subjected (welcomingly) to plenty of manioc in Paraguay and more beef in Argentina, we were ready for something different. Something with spice. We got something different.

First up is saice, a dish that held lots of mystery in my mind, but which turned out to be finely-chopped meat in a spicy tomato-y red sauce. Not bad, but sadly lacking the magical properties I had assigned to it. Lots of potatoes (of course) and peas included as well.

I’ve already mentioned salteñas in the empanada section, I just want to show them here again and mention them as a breakfast food. This is the thing to eat in the morning, along with a juice or coffee. Filling, hot, and often a little sweet, we had them now and again when a fast morning meal was required.

Papas rellenas (stuffed potatoes) were a dish we had at every meal, I think. It’s a time-consuming dish to make, but delicious to eat. Chris made them and got a recipe in Cuzco, which I may post later if I can get my hands on it. Potatoes are cooked, then mashed, then re-formed into potato shape around some kind of filling and fried. The filling was the best part, as you could put whatever you wanted in the middle. We had it with cheese and tomato sauce, just cheese, meat and onions, green onions, and probably more that I can’t think of. Often eaten for breakfast (think a clump of hashbrowns with a surprise in the middle if you’re stuck on tradition Western breakfast food), they can also be found in restaurants as lunch or dinner, or as an appetizer. Yum yum yum. This one was had at a vegetarian restaurant, but we got meat-filled ones on the street easily enough.

Pique a lo macho can be found at almost any restaurant and I took to calling it Bolivian poutine. It’s made very similarly to poutine - you start with a thick layer of french fries, then pour over top a cooked mix of beef, sausage/hot dogs, onions, and pretty much anything else you want, cooked in a gravy-like sauce. Slice a boiled egg over top and you’ve got yourself a heart-stoppingly delicious meal. That’s guava juice in the background.

Chris ordered this dish for lunch in Potosí on our one day in town. It’s called charkekan (or a reasonable facsimile thereof, I don’t remember if that’s spelled right). It’s a dish found only in that department (the provinces are broken down into departments here in Bolivia and other countries in this area). Made with mote (boiled corn), potatoes, cheese, a boiled egg, and llama jerky, it was good, though nothing to rave about. Still, worth ordering, if for no reason other than to say you’ve eaten llama jerky.

That’s about it for dishes that really caught our attention in Bolivia. I can understand why no one is in a rush to export this - Bolivian food is more hearty than refined, designed to fill your belly, for the whole day if need be. The juices were what really stole our hearts. That said, if you’re in Bolivia, do try and sample all that you can - you never know when something will jump out at you. At least you’re always given hot sauce on the table to add a little zing if you’d like it!

OK, I can’t leave off Argentina without mentioning our meal in a bus. A meal of meat. Two symbols that have come to mean so much to us in this country.

Not 200 metres from the border, we saw this bus with smoke coming out of it. Upon closer examination, it turned out someone had taken an old bus, installed a grill where the engine was, and opened a little restaurant. How many opportunities do you get like this? We hopped up the steps and ordered a couple of plates of meat.

The smoke filled the small cabin as people slowly came in (there were also some tables outside). A small fan lazily spun, keeping flies off the pile of meat waiting to be grilled up. A couple of buckets of water served for washing duty behind us and pre-boiled potatoes sat in a bucket. A cooler was somewhere on the bus, as we got cold Cokes with our dinner.

Of course, the food was nothing spectacular, but the experience itself was just fun. And that, my friends, is the end of Argentine food for us for a while.

Here’s a few of the foods we had the pleasure of sampling as we headed up up up to the Bolivian border.

Andean salad appeared on one menu and looked interesting, so we ordered it. Goat cheese, corn, potatoes, and onions with a sprinkle of pepper on top sounds pretty simple, and it is, but it makes a rather nice salad. The corn was a little dry - fresh, sweet corn would’ve done the trick much better. I loved the goat cheese. Loved it.

Soups also came up for the first time in this country - Argentina is not a soup region, the exception being up here. We tried locro in Salta - it wasn’t a new taste to us, with a lot of places in Buenos Aires serving it, especially in the winter. We had to have it where it came from, though. It was first made from the leftover parts - bony meat, tripe, etc. along with beans. We had also had it Tucumán and enjoyed it there as well as here. Nowadays, the meat is generally better, though in Tucumán we had it in a market and there was tripe in it. Still one of the best I had.

We also had quinoa soup and peanut soup in Jujuy, both of which were less than satisfying. The quinoa soup was just a broth with quinoa in it - we had much better creamy quinoa soups with potatoes and greens in Bolivia and Peru. The peanut soup was good, but not great. It was full of chunks of peanuts. It’s something I would experiment with, but wouldn’t use this one - again, had better versions in Bolivia, thicker with more stuff. (Quinoa on the left, peanut on the right.)

What post on the NW would be complete without a note on tamales and humitas? Especially since humitas are possibly Christine’s favourite food in South America so far. Both have a corn base and both are cooked inside corn husks, usually boiled (though we saw baked humitas in Bolivia, which gave them a different taste). Tamales are spiced meat surrounded by corn mush/polenta while humitas (or humintas, as they are known in Bolivia) are a polenta and egg mixture. Hot when you get them, the smells greet you and your stomach rumbles as you open up the wrappers. In the picture, the humita is on the left and the tamale is on the right.

This is one of the best menu translations (or transmachinations) I’ve seen. My dad’s Spanish isn’t the best, I know that, so I’m going to stay away, even though I do like kid. (It should be goat with Spanish potatoes. Someone fed it to the internet translator.)

And I’m sure Disney is cool with this. Spicy Mickey!

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted an empanada update, so here we go. We’ve eaten a lot of empanadas, but these are the ones of note. Or at least, the ones that I remember.

• 

  Dorada empanadas, had in Corrients province in Posadas along the Río Paraná, famous for the dorada fish. It’s an amazing tasting fish (and a huge one) that this region is well-known for. This empanada was bought at a fish shop, with the owner wandering over after giving us our empanadas to hack off a slab of fish for another customer. There’s some kind of green as well as the fish.

• 

  Empanadas mandiocas. I though these empanadas in Paraguay would be filled with manioc/yuca, but instead the dough itself was manioc flour. The texture was like eating a deep-fried paste. This wasn’t a bad thing - it was soft and tasty with a nice meaty inside. Way more filling than a regular empanada as well - one was usually enough to fill you up for lunch.

• Also had empanadas with palmitos, or palm hearts, in Paraguay. Palmitos are very, very popular here, despite the fact that they’re rather expensive, an odd fact in a country half-covered in palms. There weren’t just the palmitos, there was also a white sauce.
• 

  Empanadas salteñas. These empanadas are known all over Argentina for good reason. Salteño cooks cook potatoes in with the meat, making for a much more filling empanada and one filled with flavour. The potatoes absorb the spices and give the entire piece more zing. Add to that the hot sauce that comes with empanadas up here (and it gets hotter the closer you get to the Argentina/Bolivia border) and you have a great flavour party.

• Also in the Jujuy region, we tried some new regional empanada variants, one of them becoming my favourite so far. First, with the pre-eminence of llama here, we had to order a llama empanada (a llamapanada?) which just tasted like a regular meat empanada. Didn’t have that zing that llama meat has. The other empanada, however, excited my empanada taste buds to new levels - goat cheese and quinoa. Lots of goats up here, so lots of cheese, and it works so well in empanadas. Yum.
• 

  Crossing into Bolivia, empanadas continued, though they weren’t usually called empanadas anymore. Instead, there were salteñas and tucumanas. The salteñas were very similar to the empanadas we had had in Salta - filled with meat and potatoes, though these were extremely juicy and always baked. Each street-side vendor had a little bowl of homemade hot sauce to add and it was HOT. Tucumanas, at least the ones I had, were fried and contained giant pieces of meat inside. Hot sauces were again available. A lot of people had these for breakfast here.

Whew! I think that’s got us caught up empanadically (sure, that’s a word) for now. Still searching for ever more empanada variants - keep an eye out for more!

Two things that you can find anywhere in Paraguay that are guaranteed to fill you up. Chipa is made in huge batches in the morning and sold throughout the day at bus stations, on buses, to passers-by on the sidewalk, in parks…you get the idea. It squeaks when you eat it fresh. It’s often filled with cheese (the basic chipa and the one the recipe here is for), but can also be filled with meat and possibly other fillings. They don’t stay well for more than a day, so if you make this, plan to eat it all that day, preferrably right away (or serve to a crowd). We often had a couple for breakfast along with some juice. The chipa in this picture are the two crunchy-looking things in the middle, sopa paraguaya on the right, and a lonely little empanada sitting on the left.

Sopa paraguaya may be the quintessential dish for Paraguay. Taking a look at it, you might think it’s just cornbread, but it’s so much more. It’s got onions, it’s creamier (if a bread can be creamy), and it’s a meal within itself. This is a good-looking recipe here (haven’t tried it yet myself, though) and I recommend trying it out.

Both recipes are from Comida Paraguaya by Josefina Velilla de Aquino, a book I think we will treasure long into the future. Thanks again to Chris for the translation.

CHIPA

250 gms fat (shortening, butter, lard, etc.)
8 eggs
500 gms grated “Paraguayan cheese” (or another salty, softish white cheese)
1 tbsp anis
1 tbsp rough salt
1 c milk
1¼ kilo manioc flour

1. Beat the fat, eggs, and cheese together.
2. Add the anis, salt dissolved in milk, and flour, stir together.
3. Knead well, although not too long.
4. Form chipas, which are usually either the shape and size of a donut, or the shape of a long, thin dinner bun.
5. Place on a buttered and floured pan, bake at 250 degrees C for about 25 minutes.

SOPA PARAGUAYA (Paraguayan Cornbread)

½ kilo onions
1 c water
1 tbsp rough salt
¾ c fat (they suggest pork lard, I’m sure butter or something would be fine)
300 gms cheese (some kind of salty, soft, white cheese)
2 c curdled milk
500 gms corn flour (polenta)
4 eggs

1. Boil the onions (chopped finely) in the water and salt for 10 minutes in a covered pot. Let cool.
2. In a separate bowl, beat the fat until foamy. Add the eggs one by one, the cheese (grated very finely) and the boiled onions (just the onions – save the water for later). Beat well after each addition.
3. Add the milk and the onion water, then the corn flour.
4. Let rest for 15 minutes.
5. Put in a deep-dish pan, buttered and floured, cook at 200ºC for 1 hour.

* Many people put grated corn kernels in in addition to or instead of the polenta.
* You can also add only the yolks in Step 2, and then gently add the whites, beaten until fluffy, after Step 4.

This may not look the most appetizing, but it is an amazing meat broth-soup commonly eaten here in Paraguay. A pretty simple recipe, it results in a very flavourful soup that I really enjoyed every time I got it.

This recipe is taken from Comida Paraguaya by Josefina Velilla de Aquino. Translation by Chris.

SOYO

500 g minced meat
2 L cold water
2 tbsp rice
3 tbsp oil
1 medium onion
1 bell pepper
1 tomato
3 green onions
1 level tbsp flour
salt
oregano
parsley

1. Grind meat and rice in a mortar or a food processor several times, until it forms a paste. Put in a bowl and mix well. (You may also mix meat and water in the food processor.)

2. Heat the oil in a pan. Cook the onions a little, then add the tomato, pepper, and finely chopped green onion. Add the flour to this sauce, then the meat and rice in water. Stir until it comes to a boil.

3. Add salt, oregano, and parsley to taste. If you wish, you can put the whole soup through the blender again for a smoother dish.

Serves 8.

Often served with noodles in the soup.

Traveling around, we’ve tried a lot of South American-based food - manoic-based dishes in Paraguay, empanadas and locro in Argentina, lots of quinoa and potatoes galore in Bolivia, guinea pig in Peru - but a few words have to be said about food from other places that is here. The delicious tastes of the world that seem to show up in the strangest places on this continent.

South America has often been a haven to those fleeing somewhere else. Germans - both persecuted and persecutors - came after World War II, Chinese and Japanese came to work and build Peru and Bolivia decades ago, the Mennonites came to Paraguay, continuing their 400-year-long search for a place of their own, Arabians came over for reasons I don’t know, the Welsh left the harsh mine life of their country for Argentina….the list goes on and on. And they all brought their traditions with them.

In Northern Argentina (both west and east, we found), Arabian food is not hard to find. There are a lot of Arabians up here - the ex-President who pretty much messed up the country (long story), Carlos Menem, was of Arabic descent and from the northern half of the country. The food is as good as one could hope for, especially stranded in a city with fries, pizza, and milanesas all around. Baba ghanoush, shwarmas, hummus, sfijas, keppe - it’s all there. We ate rather happily in Posadas watching the traffic go by and as well in Salta, where they served us all that we could eat. Also in Tucumán, and I’m sure you can find it in numerous other places in the area.

Crossing into Paraguay, our hostel owner in Encarnación (whose wife was Japanese) told us that we had to go to the main Japanese restaurant in town. In his opinion, it was the best in the country, maybe even on the continent. I can’t speak to being the best, as I didn’t visit every other Japanese place in Paraguay and there are a lot on the continent, but it was some damn good Japanese food.

Continuing in Paraguay, we found some absolutely delectable Korean in Ciudad del Este (also some Taiwanese). Lots of Eastern Asian immigrants in this town. The restaurant we found was so authentic there wasn’t actually any written Spanish in the place except for the health certificate - everything was Korean! Good thing we knew what we were ordering, more or less.

In Peru (and Bolivia to a lesser degree), chifa restaurants dot the cities. These are Chinese restaurants set up by immigrants, though they’re better Chinese than I ever had in Buenos Aires. It’s closest to American Chinese food - I’m still aching for a good Taiwanese meal. Soon, I hope.

Though I love experiencing the food down here, finding out what the next new taste is, it’s nice to take a break now and then from potatoes and corn and beef and get a new taste. We both look forward to more odd dishes in odd places.