Down a gravel pathway in a rural Colombian town, just over 20 miles from the Caribbean coast, a group of African women donning billowy dresses offer up baskets filled with sweets: coconut-laden cocadas, chewy caballitos, and the ever-so-sweet popped millet balls known as alegría, from the Spanish word for “joy.” Cloaked in the saturated red, yellow, and blue of the Colombian flag, the women, known as palenqueras, make a living here peddling fresh fruits and homemade treats to locals and visitors alike. But it’s not just the palenqueras’ snacks that are sweet; the quiet roads of San Basilio de Palenque are paved with the sweetness of freedom.

Palenque, as its name is typically shortened, is the first free African village in the Americas, and descendants of African slaves exist here in a way that’s foreign to most other descendants of slaves, myself included: There is no police system here, and never has been. Instead, locals self-govern, and approach disputes using locally-trusted practices of forgiveness and conflict resolution. This atmosphere has enabled the community’s African heritage to flourish well beyond the legacy of Colombian enslavement. Elders retain ancient medicinal practices, young musicians revitalize erstwhile music traditions, and home cooks and chefs preserve their generations-old recipes and culinary techniques—all rooted in customs and practices brought over by their enslaved ancestors in the early 16th century. 

That heritage was immediately evident even before I arrived in Palenque, along with about 10 other Black American travelers. Roughly 4.7 million Colombians are of African descent, making up just under 10 percent of the country’s population. In Cartagena, 30 miles or so to the north, their influence is most recognizable in the street food: Arepas, the popular flatbreads frequently stuffed with meat and cheese, are made from a dough of ground and mashed maize, a common ingredient for Indigenous and Black Colombians. Among vendors doling out papas con huevo y carne (potato balls with eggs and meat) and potato- or meat-stuffed empanadas, the palenqueras, who sometimes commute north to make more money in Cartegena’s main squares, are easily visible in their vibrant colors, selling the same sweets I encountered in their storied hometown. 

In Palenque, though, that African influence extends far beyond the food: It’s an inextricable feature of the place itself. As you arrive in town, you are welcomed immediately by a striking statue of the freedom fighter Benkos Biohó, a Guinea Bissau–born revolutionary who escaped a Spanish slave port in Cartagena in the 16th century and led his people to freedom. Settling in the mountainous Montes de María region of the country, he organized a runaway slave network to help other enslaved Africans reach their liberation. He was ultimately captured and executed in 1621, but his efforts toward freedom weren’t entirely in vain: In 1713, after years of failing to take back the settlement, the Spaniards surrendered their attacks, and Palenque effectively became the first free African village, by decree of the King of Spain. Today, lionized through the brass statue, Biohó extends a single shackled arm, grasping for one more chance to bring another soul into a free world.

More than 300 years after its founding, food, art, and music have become some of Palenque’s most prominent features. Walking through the gravel roads, songs drift from open windows, while local bands perform in the streets throughout the day. Drum beats and the sounds of rhythmic steps merge with the music as it crescendos and reverberates across town. Brightly painted murals adorn storefronts and walls, many depicting Black women experiencing the ebbs and flows of life. 

As I swipe beads of sweat from my forehead, I see a mural showing a Black woman with words inscribed in her braids, an ode to a clever trick among enslaved African women who braided maps and instructions into their hair to provide key information and escape routes during the transatlantic slave trade. They would braid seeds into their hair as well, which enabled ingredients like tamarind, bitter melon, kola nut, and the subtly sweet melegueta pepper to become part of Colombia’s foodways. Elsewhere, a stoic Black woman’s eyes seem to meet the end of the short road, and a colorful “Black Lives Matter” sign points to Black people’s interconnected, global fight for liberation. 

I am soon encircled by a group of children, recruiting me into their game of tag as we approach “The House of Music.” Founded by local musical group Kombilesa Mi (which means “my friend,” in Palenquero, the Creole language here), the small museum is home to a collection of regionally specific instruments, like the Cuban-inspired marímbula and large drums called buleadors. The band members hope to transform the space to welcome even more visitors, and are actively raising money to reach their $12,000 goal. “Music is really the heart and soul of Palenque,” says Blue Apple Beach hotelier Portia Hart, “so having an institution like this readily available for the community and visitors is imperative.” 

Palenque’s music history includes a combination of traditions brought over and adapted by enslaved Africans from places including Nigeria and Central Africa. In 1927, Cuban influences reached the local music scene, which continued to evolve as more local musicians drew inspiration from other parts of the diaspora. As we walk to lunch, we are treated to some music from a local group that march near us down the road, dressed in some of the cleanest multicolored short sets in the area, their ebullient lyrics and colorful instruments rousing the entire neighborhood.

“Everything we do—how we learn how to use our environment, how we prepare the plants that grow nearby, the way we prepare fish, the way we prepare our medicine—it’s a result of our heritage from the African people,” says Víctor Simarra Reyes, a chef, educator, and an advocate for Palenque pride. 

Just a few blocks away from Biohó’s statue, at a friend’s home, Reyes has prepared an exquisite meal for us. Quiet and uninterested in small talk, Reyes focuses on getting the food to our table, which is covered in bright, pear-green banana leaves. Within just a few minutes, there are generous helpings of meat, rice, stews, and sauces. Reyes throws his towel over his shoulder, and gestures with his hands in urgency. 

“Eat,” he says. And so we do. I take handfuls of hen and cassava in a lightly sweet coconut sauce, served with a thick red bean pottage. We all take increasingly bigger bites of his bollo de plátano con cerdo asado, a traditional plantain bun cooked with roasted pork; and his cabeza de gato, a smashed green plantain snack he’d decided that day to combine with a kind of fresh cheese. We enjoy our share of sweets during a magnificent dessert spread: alegría, like the palenqueras served, sweet and fragrant with coconut, and enyucado, a cassava cake enlivened with star anise. 

It’s a marvelous feast that clearly has required hours of cooking. Reyes explains that he chose to share these dishes not in spite of their difficulty, but because of it. “We wanted to show that this cooking is not simple,” Reyes says. “It requires a lot of time, and a lot of effort.” This education is part of a larger movement that Reyes has long championed—working with Palenque cooks and chefs to preserve and create from their local foodways, rather than have their food expressed by non-Black chefs and writers. He has become a voice for sharing what he describes as Palenque’s “rustic” dining with the world, and fully and proudly communicates the integral role African roots play in their food.

Reyes’ work is documented in the cookbook Kumina ri Palenge pa tó Paraje, or “Palenquero Cooking for the World,” in English: a community collaboration he spearheaded to document recipes spanning more than 300 years of the town’s history. He and his wife, Ruth Reyes, consulted more than 600 local home cooks, collecting recipes and selecting an elite group of recipe writers and testers. “We were the first ones to go through the recipes, collect them, and put them on paper so we don’t let these traditions die,” Reyes says. Together, they produced the first cookbook documenting Palenque’s cuisine, which went on to receive the “Best Cookbook in the World” award at the 2014 Gourmand World Cookbook awards in Beijing. 

Before Reyes was a chef, he was a young African Colombian boy, helping his grandmother with her sancocho trifásico, a three-meat soup that typically took a full day to prepare. Often served with cassava and rice, both of which Reyes says are mainstays of the local diet, the soup is a peppery, aromatic, and deeply soothing dish that has persisted in home kitchens. He recalls the once-ubiquitous (and labor-intensive) bollo de maíz, a fried, roasted corn snack, which he laments had disappeared from many Palenque homes by the time he was a young man.

I get the chance to experience some of this labor with Antonia Cassiani, a Palenque native and local tour guide who goes by the name “Samba.” Gripping a massive pestle along with another partner, we rhythmically beat the corn as our group sings songs to encourage us. The process is reminiscent of an enduring practice in which women pile rice, grains, or corn into a massive wooden mortar and use their physical strength to do what locals call, “pillaring the corn.” That is, grinding the ingredients while singing songs that illustrate their dreams, concerns, and everyday thoughts. “This kitchen instrument was the creative engine of many women who poured their ideas into it, and sang their sorrows to it,” says Reyes. “It’s another example of just how important Black women are to our community, and to our food.”

When Reyes first started cooking, he picked up history and recipes orally; it wasn’t until later in his life that he learned to read and write so he could record and share his knowledge. When he graduated from elementary school at the age of 50, he immediately put his new skills to use: As part of his graduation requirements, which encouraged students to do something impactful for the community, he authored the cookbook. The goal for most, it seems, in Palenque, is not to climb and climb and climb chasing trivial achievements, but rather to salvage, to save, and to secure. 

“I take pride in my role as the representative of our traditions and our cuisine,” says Reyes. “After all these years of working, that’s what I cherish most.” 

Palenque hasn’t always been so comfortable with sharing its culture: The legacy of colonization has made many in the community understandably resistant to outside influence. Even Ruth, Reyes’ wife, was considered suspicious when she first moved to Palenque from the similar small Colombian town of San Antonio. An outsider, then, was always an outsider. But Reyes and his peers are learning to embrace opening their doors to other descendants of the African diaspora. 

“I’m very joyful that the community of Palenque is very open,” Reyes says of the shift. “My heart warms every time I see 80 buses full of tourists. Palenqueros are welcoming them and are showing their traditions, their cuisine, and their culture. They’re taking pride in it and showing it to the world.”

Reyes and his peers recognize a solidarity among curious Black travelers who come to Palenque. It might be for the food, the music, or simply the evidence that we all have a shared home, a shared origin story. The canvases on which we were forced to design a life reveal a com – mon search for freedom—perhaps most evidenced in our ability to survive and thrive in different parts of the world. 

Prior to my departure, I visit Biohó’s statue once again, his face charged and yearning to be free. My own family, like many others, were enslaved on American coasts in the Deep South, and though Emancipation supposedly gave us freedom, it would be another century before my people gained equal rights in the United States. The quest for Black liberation can be devastating. Our culture, heritage, and contributions are still often misrepresented or under – appreciated. We lose our heroes to state-sanctioned violence, are lectured about our behavior, and are chastised for demanding a society where equity and decency are primary values.

“There’s a phrase that resonates here,” Pedro Mosqueda, a chef and student of Reyes, tells me. “I’m happy, and it is not because of the music, but because of the leader who gave me my freedom.” As I gaze upon the town, filled with Afro-Colombians dancing, playing soccer, and lounging out under the dazzling sunset, I remember that freedom is so often something we find within ourselves.

Recipes

Colombian Stewed Chicken with Achiote and Yam

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Creole Coconut Chicken

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The post Colombia and West Africa Unite on the Plate in This Fascinating Food Town appeared first on Saveur.

I’m at dinner on a boat in the heart of the Amazon, and my mouth is tingling as if the anaesthetic has just worn off after a visit to the dentist. This, I’m told, is part of the joy of eating tacacá, a tangy manioc soup made with salted shrimp and an herb called jambu whose stimulating properties and tongue-numbing effects are a touchstone of Amazonian cuisine.  

In a globalized world, encountering ingredients and flavors that surprise the palate is increasingly rare—and something of a luxury for any food lover. That was my takeaway from a five-day journey along the Tapajós river with Amazon cruise company Kaiara, the brand-new initiative from Brazilian travel expert Martin Frankenberg. 

This is not your average culinary cruise: Kaiara ventures deep into the rainforest, bringing travelers in touch with local communities and their extraordinary foodways. Frankenberg hopes this kind of engaged, low-impact tourism will encourage economic alternatives to the depredations of logging, mining, and soy farming, the main sources of income in the area.

In the riverside town of Santarém I boarded the Tupaiú, a vintage river yacht (one of three in Kaiara’s fleet) with wood-paneled cabins and open-sided dining areas fanned by the breeze. The eight-strong crew included chef Socorro da Silva and sous-chef Naiana (her daughter), whose cooking is based on Amazonian ingredients including freshwater fish like giant pirarucu (which da Silva roasts in a Brazil nut crust); endemic fruits like the tart, appley taperebá and cupuaçu, with its curious acetone-like overtones that dissipate in da Silva’s homemade sorbet.   

The Tapajós is so wide it seemed more like an inland sea. In the afternoons, as the boat chugged gently downriver, I fished for piranhas, which later became dinner. I still crave that firm, flavorful meat enhanced by a sizzle in the frying pan. At nightfall we moored beside beaches of dazzling white sands and clear blue water in time for sundowner caipirinhas, made either classic (with lime), with cupuaçu, or—for a cocktail my taste buds won’t soon forget–with that tingly jambu.  

By day, shore excursions and workshops (nothing too academic) enlightened us about ancestral forest crops like manioc and cacao—and how they can be farmed sustainably. 

Another highlight was the botanical walk with healer Raimunda de Sousa of the Atodi community. For her, and many Amazonians, the rainforest serves as a larder, spice rack, and medicine cupboard. As we strolled the forest path, de Sousa reached up to pluck a shiny black seed known as cumaru. She placed it in my hand, and I took a whiff. It smelled as voluptuous as vanilla and was much used, she said, in local preserves and desserts. Then there was a rock-hard nut called babaçu whose oil had powerful medicinal properties.

The babaçu sometimes came with a surprise inside: a small white grub. “And this,” confided de Sousa with a smile, “is a delicious thing to eat.”     

The post This New Food-Centric Cruise Goes Deep Into the Amazon appeared first on Saveur.

Peru is on top of the culinary world. Lima had more restaurants on this year’s World’s 50 Best list than any other city, and media everywhere extol its “fusion” cuisine—influenced by Indigenous traditions, Spanish colonists, and Japanese and Chinese immigrants. But there’s a recent trend in Peru that’s mostly been left out of the story, and it appears to be here to stay: Venezuelan-Peruvian cuisine. 

The new hybrid seems to fit neatly into the classic “fusion” narrative: Immigrants blend elements of their favorite dishes from back home with those of their adopted country, and everyone comes together—literally and figuratively—to eat. Take Peru’s national dish, ceviche. It originated with Indigenous Peruvians who for centuries preserved fish with juice from the tumbo (a relative of the passion fruit), before European traders introduced limes. More recently, Japanese immigrants brought their sashimi expertise, cutting the fish more finely and marinating it just seconds before serving to create the fresh ceviche Peruvians know today—on its face, a happy multicultural success story. But as I learned talking to Venezuelan restaurant owners and patrons in Lima, the reality of Peruvian fusion is more complicated. 

We diners are prone to forget that fusion isn’t just food—the orange chicken or nachos or bánh mì. It’s also the process that created it, often one of inspiration and desperation, resourcefulness and resilience. 

Peru and Venezuela, being in the same part of the world and sharing a similar colonial history, have long enjoyed some level of culinary cross-pollination. But owing in large part to the disastrous policies of president Nicolás Maduro, that relationship has intensified because of immigration. In the last decade, the Venezuelan bolívar lost over 99% of its value against the U.S. dollar, rendering people’s cash savings worthless, while the minimum wage dropped below $1 per month. There were food shortages, desperation, and rising crime. One-fifth of the Venezuelan population saw no choice but to leave, and since 2016, about 1.5 million have fled to Peru. Those immigrants, despite their hardship, are now creating new dishes that bridge the culinary divide. 

One such recipe is the ají de gallina tequeño. For the uninitiated, a Venezuelan tequeño is a crispy, dunkable cheese stick wrapped in a slightly sweet yeasted dough. Ají de gallina, on the other hand, is a creamy Peruvian stew with shredded chicken and the country’s famous yellow-orange chili pepper, the ají amarillo. Until recently, combining the two might have seemed unthinkable—but not to Oscar Vento, who fled the crisis himself and has one parent from Venezuela and another from Peru. Vento is the 29-year-old owner of Tequeño Lab, a casual restaurant in Lima’s artsy Barranco district that serves finger food in baskets in a vibrant dining room covered in handwritten notes from customers and images of the place’s animated tequeño mascot. His signature tequeños are a family affair: His mother, Lorena, makes the ají de gallina, and he stuffs it into the cheesy dough stick. Imagine an old-school casserole wrapped in something you’d get from Sonic. In classic Venezuelan fashion, it all comes with an array of sauces for dunking—creamy garlic, sweet corn, guacamole. 

Despite initially getting some flak from a few purist locals, business is good, he says. Everybody, Venezuelans and Peruvians alike, love “seeing themselves represented in something,” Vento said. “This is the place to feel like both are fine.”

That’s an important message. In Peru, and across Latin America, xenophobia toward Venezuelans is an increasingly serious problem. Many politicians and media organizations in Peru have scapegoated the migrants, blaming them for everything from crime to prostitution to unemployment. A recent survey of Peruvians found that 80% are opposed to more Venezuelans moving into their district and nearly a quarter have no sympathy for their plight whatsoever. One in four Venezuelan children in Peru’s most populous districts is not in school (often because discriminatory school administrators refuse to enroll them). Vento has no illusions about Venezuelan food single-handedly righting these deep-seated wrongs, but does believe it can be a force for good. “Injecting my food from my home country in this project is emotional,” he said, his own small way to “heal this conflict in this place.”

Projects like his have popped up all over Lima. Joselín Guzmán, a 23-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, started a soup stand with fewer frills than Tequeño Lab—but all of the soulful fusion. Each Sunday they set up plastic chairs and tables on a wide, dusty road median in San Juan de Lurigancho, a lower-income district further inland from Barranco that’s come to be called “Little Venezuela.” There’s only one item on the menu: Venezuelan sancocho soup. The broth tastes bright with cilantro and brims with potato, yucca, and fatty hunks of beef rib meat. 

I met one customer who drives over 30 minutes every week to get a bowl that reminds him of home. In Venezuela, he was an accountant and economist. In Peru, he operates construction vehicles, unable to transfer his qualifications. He seeks out the soup, he said, “to rescue something lost—our customs, our way of working, our way of being.” 

Guzmán tries to make the soup like she did at home, but here there’s a big difference: Peruvian choclo corn, nutty and with extra-large kernels. The variation is new to customers both Venezuelan and Peruvian. 

But in Lima, Venezuelan-Peruvian fusion—and choclo specifically—isn’t all family-style street food. Down the road from Tequeño Lab, there’s another Venezuelan chef, Juan Luis Martínez, who’s generating buzz for unexpectedly refined dishes—and earning international recognition for them. 

Meet Mérito, a restaurant where international tourists and upper-crust local foodies delight in dishes like choclo a la brasa, a barbecued ear of large-kerneled Peruvian choclo corn served in its steaming husk with a dipping sauce made of Venezuelan cheeses (creamy natilla and salty queso llanero). “I always wanted to create something different, something new,” Martínez said. “But I felt my roots had to be there.” 

Martínez, who grew up and went to culinary school in Venezuela, moved to Lima to cook with Virgilio Martínez at Central—the best restaurant on Earth, according to some critics. In 2018, he ventured out on his own and opened Mérito, where he combined that newfound knowledge with his oldest memories of food back home. That lifetime of culinary discovery is on display in Mérito’s version of Venezuela’s most famous national dish, the arepa. It features pork belly glazed with Andean tamarillo and butter infused with chicha de jora—an ancient Peruvian fermented corn drink known as “the nectar of the Incas.” It’s an old favorite revamped with the intriguing and distinctive flavors of Peru’s biodiverse coasts, mountains, and jungle.  

Using the country’s expansive ingredient pantry in new ways, Martínez is pushing Peruvian cuisine forward. But something important is missing from that story.

“Cultural encounters are full of friction and tension,” said Raúl Matta, a Peruvian food studies researcher with the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement. Matta’s one of a number of scholars wary of mainstream, romanticized views of Peruvian fusion—one that can gloss over the uglier parts of its history. Take Chifa (Chinese-Peruvian) cuisine, for instance, which Matta finds as a relevant comparison to Venezuelan-Peruvian fusion. 

When over 80,000 Chinese immigrant laborers poured into Peru in the mid-1800s, they were considered a threat to public health—“lazy and not very hygienic,” according to Matta. Over generations, despite such adversity, they became integrated into Peruvian society by learning Spanish, starting businesses, and—importantly—sharing their food. Today, Chifa restaurants are seemingly everywhere in Lima, and you can’t imagine the city without dishes like arroz chaufa, Peruvian-Chinese fried rice. 

Whether the same story plays out with the new Venezuelan diaspora in Peru remains to be seen. “Venezuelan migration will put to the test this idea of fusion,” Matta said. But there is reason for optimism: studies show that people who share food (or even just eat similarly to each other) tend to cooperate better, and when they experience other cultures, they show less prejudice. 

For Martínez’s part, he’s confident that when “passionate people make passionate food, that can only translate into good energy going back to everyone who eats it.” He added that any cook who pours their creativity into a new dish, like a “new arepa—that has to make an impact.” Already in the Venezuelan restaurant Canaima Restobar, in San Juan de Lurigancho, there is a lomo saltado arepa. One of Peru’s most beloved chifa dishes—stir fried beef, onions, ají amarillo, and tomatoes with soy sauce—stuffed into a Venezuelan arepa with a creamy cilantro dipping sauce. It’s fusion inside fusion. 

These new arepas, soups, and tequeños are delicious silver linings. They are a testament to a creative group of migrants making the best out of a bad situation. Juan Luis Martínez wonders whether any of these novel dishes will seem like fusion at all decades from now: In time, they may become as ubiquitous as crab rangoons or pepperoni pizza. Fusion, after all, is just an idea. “There’s one source and everything after that is fusion,” Martínez said. But if we can remember a bit of the ingenuity and perseverance behind these dishes, it could help us prevent past mistakes—which can only make them taste that much better.

The post A New Cuisine Is Born in Peru appeared first on Saveur.

“In Venezuela, we don’t call it lasagna. It’s pasticho.” That’s what New York Mets rookie Francisco Álvarez told me one summer afternoon in the bowels of Citi Field, the Mets’ home stadium in Queens. 

Álvarez looks like a catcher. Muscular and compact, he endures a different game than his teammates, wearing heavy protective gear and sitting crouched behind the batter for nine grueling innings. Most reporters chase down Álvarez to ask about his prolific home run power or rapid ascent to the Major Leagues at such a young age—but I was after a different kind of story, one about the curious ancestral dish he’s become known for in the Mets clubhouse. 

Pasticho sounds like Greek pastitsio (the layered casserole of tubular pasta, spiced ground beef, and bechamel) but has more in common with lasagna bolognese. Both call for lasagna noodles, slow-simmered ragù, nutmeg-laced bechamel, and a top layer of bubbling crisp-edged cheese. But what distinguishes pasticho (or at least Álvarez’s family’s version of the dish) from lasagna bolognese are a few extras: thin slices of ham, fresh mozzarella, a hint of cumin in the meat sauce, and torn basil leaves strewn throughout.

Like many Venezuelans, Álvarez grew up eating pasticho, but that wasn’t the case for fellow rookies Mark Vientos and Brett Baty, who hail from places as far flung as Pembroke Pines, Florida and Spicewood, Texas, respectively. So earlier this year, when a game was rained out, Álvarez invited his teammates back to his apartment to introduce them to one of his favorite childhood dishes. Little did they know, Álvarez had never made pasticho in his life: That same day, he called his mom to ensure he got the family recipe just right.

From the moment everybody took a bite, it was clear: Álvarez couldn’t just play ball; he could cook.

To understand what pasticho meant to Álvarez, I went to the source: Álvarez’s mother, Yolanda. When asked how she felt about her son’s first pasticho, she said, “I didn’t think he’d want to spend his day off cooking. But I was proud he wanted to follow the family recipe. As a kid, he would always ask me to make it for him, because he thought it made him play better.”

Pasticho is a nostalgic dish for Venezuelans of all walks of life, according to Ivo Díaz, the Venezuelan-born owner of the Venezuelan restaurant Casa Ora in Brooklyn. Díaz ranks pasticho just behind arepas, pabellón (shredded stewed beef with rice and beans), and hallacas (Venezuelan tamales) in terms of culinary importance. But perhaps because Americans equate lasagna with Italian food and seek out arepas and the like at Venezuelan restaurants, pasticho hasn’t caught on in the U.S. 

Few Americans realize that Venezuelans are one of the top three pasta-consuming nations in the world, according to Coldiretti, the Italian agricultural organization. That’s largely because, just after World War II, hundreds of thousands of Italians emigrated to Venezuela. 
“Every city in Venezuela makes pasticho slightly differently,” said Díaz. Some layer in sliced boiled potatoes, hard boiled eggs, shredded chicken, or even hot dogs. Then there’s pasticho de berenjena, in which thin slices of cooked eggplant replace the lasagna noodles, not unlike eggplant parmigiana or Greek moussaka.

The thing about pasticho is, it’s a labor of love. Sure, there’s nothing technically complicated about the dish, but between searing and simmering the ground beef, whisking up the bechamel sauce, boiling the noodles, and assembling all the layers, making pasticho takes time. So when Álvarez carved out an afternoon to cook for his team, it was an act of altruism. You make pasticho for people you care about. 

The Mets signed Álvarez out of his native Venezuela at age 16. When he debuted in the Major Leagues last year, he was the youngest player in baseball, at 20 years old. And he’s turning heads: This season, he nearly broke an all-time record for most home runs by a catcher age 21 or younger. “With all due respect to my teammates, I see myself as a leader,” Álvarez told me, tacitly acknowledging his age.

For Álvarez, leadership off the field means cooking pasticho for his hungry teammates, whom he calls his brothers. “The most important part of being a catcher is to go out there every day with happiness. I want that positivity to rub off on everyone around me,” he said. This approach isn’t lost on Álvarez’s mother, who recalls one moment from the season when she was particularly proud. “He hit a game-tying home run in Arizona. I was so happy to see how excited he was running around the bases. He has always played the game he loves with that amount of joy.”

Pasticho (Venezuelan Lasagna)

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The post The Unexpected Dish That Brings the Mets Rookies Together appeared first on Saveur.

Whenever someone asks me for recommendations on what to do in my hometown, my answer is simple: eat. It’s not that Lima—a sprawling metropolis of 11 million people—doesn’t have other charms, like dramatic views out to the Pacific Ocean or pre-Hispanic temples smack in the center of residential neighborhoods. But our cuisine holds a special place in our national psyche: We wake up hankering for butifarra breakfast sandwiches, go to work fantasizing about mid-morning alfajores, and go to sleep dreaming about ají peppers sizzling on the stove. 

Gone are the days when the Peruvian capital was seen as just a layover to Machu Picchu—a fact I chalk up to the city’s incredible food scene. You could say Lima’s culinary “boom” started in 2011, when Astrid y Gastón was named one of the top 50 restaurants in the world, and since then, the industry has grown exponentially. Today there are over 60,000 restaurants in Lima alone. (Compare that to some 25,000 in New York City.)

But to me, the idea of a “boom” always felt a bit misleading. Was my home country’s food culture truly dormant or unworthy until San Pellegrino came knocking? The fact is, food has been a source of national pride for generations: Long before the “foodie” hordes arrived, we knew our cuisine stood out for its idiosyncratic mix of Spanish, Indigenous, and African origins that would later be enriched by waves of immigration from Italy, France, Germany, China, Japan, and beyond. A dish like lomo saltado might seem “Peruvian” on the surface, but it cannot be explained without the Chinese wok, ubiquitous in Peruvian restaurants and homes. Tallarines verdes may remind you of Italian pasta al pesto—until you taste the combination of spinach and local cheese, which all but screams Peru.

We favored zero-kilometer, seasonal ingredients before they became a trend. We understood fusion before it became a buzzword. To eat in Lima is to walk through this history while marveling at its constant metamorphosis.

What has cemented Lima as an international food capital in recent years is both the dizzying variety of restaurants and the way our food-focused society now revolves around them. Until the 2000s, Peru’s gastronomic delights were mostly found in family kitchens, with restaurants strictly reserved for special occasions. Today, on a single block, you might find a Michelin-starred culinary temple, a mom-and-pop luncheonette, an Instagram-famous café, and a sandwich vendor setting up shop. And that’s the joy of eating around Lima—from tiny anticucherías to world-renowned food meccas, the city is a playground where you can choose your own adventure.

Isolina

Av. San Martín 101, Barranco
Phone: +51 943 833 031

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For a taste of Lima’s past, head to Isolina, where the offal dishes that were once synonymous with the city’s cuisine are getting a new lease on life. The restaurant’s currency is nostalgia, whether it’s in the abuela-approved dishes or in the boisterous, tavern-style setting that recreates the Lima of yesteryear. Those curious about criollo dishes—ones developed after colonization—can dip into arroz tapado, a three-decker beauty layering rice and ground beef topped with two fried eggs and accompanied with a side of fried plantains. Those who want to travel even further back in time can choose from deep cuts like sangrecita (crumbled, seasoned chicken’s blood) and caucau (a hearty tripe and yellow potato stew).

Pasta

Calle Choquehuanca 611, San Isidro
Phone: +51 997 601 629

Though Lima has a tradition of Italo-Peruvian food dating back to the mid-1800s, you could seldom bank on handmade pasta—until this aptly named restaurant came along with its pici cacio e pepe and pappardelle tossed in beef cheek ragù. But it’s not all Old World Italian mainstays, as anyone who orders the lettuce appetizer can attest: Romaine leaves arrive hidden under a puffy cloud of shredded cheese, crunchy bread crumbs, and specks of spicy red ají limo peppers.

El Pan de la Chola

La Mar 918, Miraflores
Phone: +51 914 680 244

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This beloved Miraflores bakery has made a name for itself by using local grains and flours—some of them ground in house on a traditional stone mill—to bake what many call the best bread in Lima. Breakfast sandwiches come on their straight-out-of-the-oven focaccia, a kamut loaf, or their signature chola bread, a crusty, wheat and rye blend. Heartier favorites include the fatty and garlicky porchetta sandwich and a grilled cheese brimming with the domestic semi-mantecoso (“buttery”) cheese, but I like ringing in foggy Lima mornings with the avocado toast: thick-cut grilled sourdough, a generously peppered ripe avocado, crunchy Maras salt, and a pool of olive oil to drizzle as desired.

Chifa Titi

Av. Javier Prado Este 1212, San Isidro
Phone: +51 952 770 672

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The arrival of Chinese laborers to Peru’s shores in 1849 birthed the fusion cuisine called Chifa, which reinterpreted Cantonese dishes using local ingredients. Since 1958, matriarch Patricia Chan has overseen this family restaurant that churns out exemplary versions of Chifa mainstays, like arroz chaufa (fried rice with sweet peppers, garlic, and green onions wokked with ginger and soy sauce), tallarín saltado (noodles stir-fried with a soy-based sauce and strips of yellow ají peppers), and crackly fried wontons served with a tamarind dipping sauce. Don’t skip the duck dishes, especially the pato al sillao: a slow-roasted masterpiece of crispy skin and succulent meat, sliced and served with honey-sweetened soy and hoisin sauce.

El Pez Amigo

Av. la Paz 1640, Miraflores
Phone: +51 1 409 4645

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Friends heading to Lima for the first time always ask me where to find the best ceviche, but the truth is, there’s great ceviche just about everywhere. What you want is a place where ceviche is a gateway to other Peruvian seafood delights. Enter El Pez Amigo, a laid-back Miraflores institution that serves up a pitch-perfect ceviche—bright with citrus juices and made with firm, freshly-caught white fish like sea bass, flounder, or sole. But there’s also a plethora of other Peruvian classics like parmesan-baked scallops and causa, which layers spicy potato purée with your choice of crab, octopus, or prawns.

Siete

Jr. Domeyer 260, Barranco
Phone: +51 966 320 855

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Siete is a well-lauded restaurant that somehow still manages to feel like a hidden gem. Tucked away on one of the quieter streets of Barranco, it attracts a cosmopolitan crowd who enjoy the hip vinyl on rotation as much as the food. Begin your evening by sipping a drink or two from the cocktail list, which plays around with Peruvian spirits like matacuy digestif. One standout dish is the boquerones, silverside fish marinated in vinegar, topped with fresh avocado, and served with a hunk of spongy focaccia. I’m also partial to the smoked carrot and feta cheese salad and the laksa made from roasted Peruvian loche squash.

La Paisana Picantería

Jirón Libertad 1412, Magdalena del Mar
Phone: +51 992 840 637

It’s common knowledge that many international cuisines left their mark on Limeño dining, but the country’s internal migration patterns have arguably been just as influential. In the 1980s and ‘90s, waves of rural Peruvians arrived in Lima fleeing the violence unleashed by insurgent groups like the Shining Path. These newcomers brought their regional specialties with them and swiftly set up shop. That’s how La Paisana, a lunch-only restaurant celebrating the cuisine of Piura in Northern Peru, came to be. Limeños and Piuranos alike gather here to gorge on green tamales, whose signature color derives from the abundant culantro leaves mixed into the dough. Regulars also love the carne aliñada con chifles (fried salt-cured meat with green plantain chips) and grouper and black clam ceviche. Thirsty? Try the chicha de jora, a cider-like pre-Hispanic fermented corn beverage served in traditional clay jars.

Yopo

Calle Monte Grande 165, Chacarilla
Phone: + 51919295850

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Peruvians eat approximately 150 million rotisserie chickens a year, which comes as no surprise given how utterly delicious Peruvian roast chicken is. The bird gets its signature depth and tenderness from a thick, stout-based marinade containing ají panca, cumin, and other fragrant spices. Everybody has their favorite asador, and mine is Yopo, one of the newer additions to the crowded scene. Yopo started as a ghost kitchen in 2019 and became a local lifeline during COVID lockdowns. Make like a Limeña and order a side of crinkle fries, the house salad, and extra ají sauce for dipping.

Tomo Cocina Nikkei 

Francisco de Paula Camino 260, Miraflores
Phone: +51 913 332 164

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You may not think of Lima as a sushi mecca—but you’d be wrong. Immigrants from Japan knew exactly what to do with the country’s 1,500 miles of coastline: They used its bounty to create the Japanese-Peruvian fusion cuisine called Nikkei. At Tomo, get a crash course in Nikkei cooking via dishes like Peruvian bigeye tuna sashimi or foie gras and toro nigiri. The menu changes depending on the daily catch, but expect locally sourced seafood like squid, red grouper, and mero murique.

Grimanesa Anticuchería

Calle Ignacio Merino 466, Miraflores
Phone: +51 941 869 568

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Grimanesa Vargas started out selling anticuchos—charcoal-grilled beef heart skewers—on a Miraflores street, and over time, she amassed such a loyal following (including chef Gastón Acurio) that in 2012 she opened her own huarique, or hole-in-the-wall. The menu is simple: either beef heart or chicken, with or without the traditional sides of boiled potatoes and Peruvian choclo (big, chewy corn kernels). What isn’t simple is the flavor: After soaking for three hours in a marinade of red vinegar, pepper, cumin, garlic, and ají panca, the meat is impaled on skewers and grilled to tender perfection over open fire.

Antigua Taberna Queirolo

San Martín 1090, Pueblo Libre
Phone: +51 1 460 0441

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El Queirolo is a tavern’s tavern, an old-school bar where generations of intellectuals have long come to debate from dusk till dawn. You are expected to linger here, as evidenced by the extensive menu, which offers everything from kid-size sandwiches like sánguche de chicharrón con camote frito—filled with sliced pork, fried sweet potato, and salsa criolla—to full entrées like ají de gallina (a shredded, creamy chicken stew in a parmesan and walnut sauce) to go-to snacks like cheese tequeños (fried wonton sticks filled with queso fresco, an unripened and mild-flavored Peruvian cheese). Whatever you wind up noshing, wash it down with a res: a cocktail you make yourself with pisco, ginger ale, sliced lime, ice and syrup or grenadine, with every ingredient brought to your table on a silver tray. 

Baan

Calle Santa Luisa 295, San Isidro
Phone: +51 994 204 416

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The winner of Best World Cuisine restaurant in this year’s Summum Awards, the country’s most prestigious culinary honor, is this ode to Southeast Asia that never strays far from its Peruvian roots. Think tiradito (thinly sliced raw fish), except swimming in red curry instead of the usual ají-based sauce. While the menu dabbles in many Southeast Asian cuisines, it builds on them with local fresh herbs and Peruvian spices. The star of the show might be the flor de loto dessert—a rice-based cookie shaped like a lotus flower floating in turmeric caramel and filled with coconut ice cream.

Central 

Av. Pedro de Osma 301, Barranco
Phone: +51 1 242 8515

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Central, named World’s Best Restaurant in 2023, might be an obvious pitstop for any food lover, but that doesn’t make it any less spectacular. The brainchild of Virgilio Martínez and Pía León provides more than exquisite food—it offers an education. Each dish on Central’s tasting menu represents one of Peru’s different ecosystems, and servers describe what’s on your plate with both awe and expertise. Recent dishes included a loche squash soup, a vision of lime-green and yellow punctuated with plump prawns and avocado. Then there was the Amazonian pacú fish, bathed in coconut milk, which arrived cloaked in a watermelon and coca-leaf foam. Central never comes off as an exercise in ego; instead, you are humbled by the edible riches the country has to offer.

The post 13 Lima Restaurants We Can’t Get Enough Of appeared first on Saveur.

Rise & Dine is a SAVEUR column by Senior Editor Megan Zhang, an aspiring early riser who seeks to explore the culture of mornings and rituals of breakfast around the world.

After catching a pre-dawn flight from Medellín and doing some early-morning trekking around the high-elevation Colombian capital of Bogotá, all my tired friends and I could think about was breakfast. As we waited in line outside La Puerta Falsa—a historic establishment that’s been serving traditional homestyle Colombian fare since the early 1800s—the smells of its famous tamales (masa, chicken, and other ingredients wrapped in banana leaves), ajiaco (a hearty chicken-and-potato stew), and chocolate completo wafted out into the street.

When we finally piled into seats on the second floor of the tiny wood-paneled restaurant, it didn’t take long for us to make our selections from the short menu. The scents that had simultaneously tortured and tantalized us were the restaurant’s can’t-miss classics, according to advice that a few Bogotana friends had shared with me before the trip.

But, just as a server was climbing the narrow stairs to take our order, I spotted something else on the menu. Last year, after I read Mariana Velasquez’s cookbook Colombiana ahead of a previous trip to Colombia, one recipe in particular stayed with me. Changua, a milky soup featuring eggs, cheese, scallion, cilantro, and hunks of bread, seemed like exactly the kind of morning meal I’d devour: a soupy, belly-warming breakfast in a bowl that requires minimal cooking effort beyond some quiet stirring. In the recipe headnote, Velasquez likens the dish to a breakfast I know well: “Changua is to Colombians what congee is to the Chinese: a comforting, soothing, and savory broth.” Though the dishes have decidedly different ingredients, I could see the common thread, and was sold.

When our spread finally arrived, the steaming-hot tamales and slurpable ajiaco were just the stick-to-your-ribs revitalization we needed. But the milky, allium-rich changua, with slices of cheese and bread fanned out across the surface and a generous portion of chopped herbs sprinkled on top, was the dish we talked about for the rest of the day.

Before tasting changua for the first time, we had little frame of reference for what a dairy-rich soup with cheese and dough soaking in it would taste like—would it be creamy? Vegetal? Like a savory cereal? As we ate spoon after spoonful, diverse textures and bold flavors made up each interesting bite, with the crisp, pungent scallions, the jammy eggs, and the chewy, milky cheese sparring for flavor dominance. We tried to draw similarities to dishes familiar to us, but none felt nearly like an adequate comparison—changua is more layered than porridge, more watery than chowder, and more textured than cereal with milk. We cleaned our bowls, all the while dunking in more bread between bites to sop up the soup. Later in the day, when hunger pangs kicked in again as we hiked down Monserrate, my friend JJ brought the conversation back to that memorable soup. “I think that changua was my favorite,” he said wistfully, and we all echoed agreement.

Bogotana chef Alejandra Cubillos González, whom I met when she was helming the kitchen at Sofitel Barú Calablanca‘s Bahía Restaurant in Isla Barú, attributes her home city’s association with soups like changua and ajiaco to the relatively chilly climate and high elevation (about 8,660 feet above sea level). Across the country’s mountainous Andean departments like Santander, Boyacá, and Cundinamarca, she says, changua is usually considered breakfast. Whenever Velasquez, who was also born and raised there, cooks and eats the dish, “it reminds me of dewy, cold mornings in Bogotá.”

It seems what often kindles affection for changua is the breakfast coming to one’s rescue on frigid days. Chef and cookbook author J. Kenji López-Alt had his first taste at a restaurant near Lake Tota in Boyacá. “It was a very cold morning in the mountains, by a fireplace,” he recalls. As he slurped down the warming bowl of changua, “I thought it was the perfect thing.” On the other hand, López-Alt’s wife, who is Colombian, grimaced and teasingly made faces while he finished his soup. “She grew up with it and never liked it,” he says.

As a group that unanimously enjoys changua, my friends and I might be something of an anomaly. “Some people love it, and others hate it,” says Velasquez of the divisive dish. So, many home cooks freely adapt the ingredients to their liking: some families add potatoes, while others choose to skip the cheese. Some place the bread into the serving bowls first before pouring the soup on top, while others leave the bread on the side and dunk it in as they eat. “Every house has their own version,” says Maria Delgado, the chef behind Cartagena’s Caffé Lunático, who recalls that her grandfather, like many, served changua with calados, a variety of stale bread. Other families might choose almojábanas or pandebono—two other Colombian bread varieties made with cheese—or a simple crusty white loaf instead.

Since returning home from Bogotá, I’ve experimented with cooking different versions of changua, especially on blustery mornings in Boston. Yet, I always go back to craving the more-is-more version La Puerta Falsa served us: lots of cheese, bread in the bowl with extra on the side for dunking, and a heap of punchy, aromatic herbs. That’s what I, a member of the pro-changua club, would call breakfast luxury.

Recipe

Changua (Milky Colombian Soup)

Get the recipe >

The post This Milky, Eggy, Cheesy Soup Comes to the Rescue on Chilly Mornings appeared first on Saveur.

Brazil’s cheesy snacks are world famous, from pão de queijo (cheese bread) to grilled coalho skewers, but the South American country has never been known for its cheesemaking prowess. Now, that’s changing. With traditional styles like Canastra and Serro winning medals at international competitions and showing up on the menus of Michelin-starred restaurants like Lasai in Rio de Janeiro and Maní in São Paulo, Brazil is in the midst of a full-blown artisanal cheese revolution. 

Though cheesemaking in Brazil stretches back several hundred years, it wasn’t until 2015, when producer Guilherme Ferreira won a silver medal at Le Mondial du Fromage et des Produits Laitiers competition in Tours, France, that the country’s cheese was recognized on an international stage. Since then, Brazil has swept the annual competition, taking home a whopping 57 medals in last year’s ceremony—coming in second only to France.

Cheesemaker Heloisa Collins of Capril do Bosque picked up one of last year’s medals. She’s been a passionate producer since 1975, after she and her husband made a home on a farm in Joanópolis, Brazil. For the first two decades, cheesemaking was only a hobby for Collins, whose day job was in applied linguistics research. On business trips to Europe, she developed a love for foreign cheeses like Valençay and Stilton, and picked up recipe books so she could recreate those styles at home. On weekends, friends came over to sample her creations. “The process allowed me to develop a varied portfolio of cheeses over a long time, with a lot of testing and no hurry,” she says. Eventually, Collins purchased a herd of goats. They helped her make her now-famous Azul do Bosque—the first blue goat cheese in Brazil, partly inspired by English Stilton, and the silver medal recipient of last year’s competition.

Today, Collins produces more than 15 cheeses inspired by different places and traditions, but all share a “tropical touch,” as she calls it. Her Cacauzinho is a chevre matured with pure cocoa powder and cumaru (tonka bean) from the state of Pará, while her Serra do Lopo is a semi-cooked goat-and-buffalo cheese that uses Brazilian beer as a wash. “In ten years, [Brazilian cheese will] occupy a place of honor in the world of artisanal cheesemaking,” she says. “We have a lot of varied and healthy bacteria in our milk, as well as molds that haven’t been described yet.”

Collins is one of the more than 100 producers who will present their goods at the forthcoming Mundial do Queijo do Brasil, the second edition of the trailblazing international competition, to be held in São Paulo from September 15-18. The weekend event will draw nearly 50,000 cheese-loving attendees and feature two first-of-their-kind contests (Best Brazilian Cheesemaker and Best Brazilian Cheesemonger) judged by a panel from the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers. As part of the festivities, 40 participating restaurants, bars, and cafés in the city will feature the competing cheeses on their menus. “This is an opportunity to show the world what’s happening in Brazil,” says the competition’s founder, Debora de Carvalho.

What makes Brazil’s artisanal cheeses so worthy of celebration? For De Carvalho, it comes down to the country’s unique terroir—the intense sunlight, sweet native grasses, and salty breeze off the South Atlantic. And of course, the cows. De Carvalho explains that Brazil started importing cattle like the Gir and Zebu breeds from India over a century ago. The animals are resistant to hot temperatures and tropical diseases, which means they’re well suited to conditions in Brazil. Their milk is naturally quite salty and high in A2 beta-casein, giving the milk a slightly different protein ratio than that of the A1 milk-producing herds in the U.S. “People who try it for the first time say it’s really interesting and different from what they’re used to,” she adds. “Some people didn’t know how to describe it. Others say it tastes like herbs.”

The distinctive taste and rich cultural traditions surrounding cheese production has led the Brazilian government to grant geographical indication status to several artisanal cheeses. While this practice is quite commonplace in Europe (with controlled products like Champagne and Parmigiano Reggiano), it’s a relatively new practice in Brazil, beginning with the protection of Queijo do Serro in 2011. Since then, a handful of cheeses have received this designation: just last year, Marajó buffalo cheese from the Amazonian island of Marajó, in Pará, was deemed worthy of protection.

As important as these designations are, cheesemakers in Brazil are generally frustrated by the government’s lack of support when it comes to distribution and sale. Most traditional artisan cheeses in Brazil, especially those from the regions of Minas Gerais and Bahia, are made from raw milk. Like the U.S., Brazil prohibits the commercialization of cheese made from raw milk unless it’s been ripened for more than 60 days—a means to mitigate contamination and reduce human illness. But hardly any of these artisanal cheeses, which have been produced by rural families for hundreds of years, meet this criterion. The minimum ripening period for Canastra, for example, is just 22 days, resulting in a semi-hard or slightly soft compact cheese. Serro is normally ripened for 3 to 15 days. This means very few cheesemakers in Brazil can sell outside their manufacturing state, and exporting the products is currently illegal. Producers who participate in international competitions like the Mondial du Fromage must effectively smuggle the products in their suitcase. “The police confiscate cheese every week in Brazil,” says De Carvalho, who herself dabbled in cheesemaking until the day the authorities showed up and seized her products.

While De Carvalho estimates there are some 900 rules governing the sale and distribution of cheese in Brazil, she is still optimistic about the future. “There is a lot of progress, mostly because most consumers prefer these cheeses.”

Cheesemaker Érico Kokya of the Pé do Morro, a farm and winery 50 miles northwest of São Paulo, is similarly hopeful. “We are discovering, or rediscovering, these cheeses in Brazil,” he says. “People are gaining interest in local products and starting to value things that are made here, so legislation will also start changing.” While he’s technically only allowed to sell his products within his local area, the limitation hasn’t stopped dozens of people from showing up to his property every weekend to pick up picnic baskets full of charcuterie, local jams, and Brazilian takes on European-inspired cheeses. Crowd favorites include the creamy and acidic Quark, which has the consistency of drained yogurt, and the Lua cheese, inspired by a Camembert recipe from Germany and matured on grills to form the white mold coating. 

In Brazil’s fine-dining scene today, domestically produced artisanal cheeses are becoming increasingly common. At São Paulo hotspot A Casa do Porco—recognized as one of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants two years and counting—Pé do Morro’s cheeses play a supporting role in succulent pork dishes prepared a dozen ways. Several other Brazilian makers’ products feature on the menu of chef Rodrigo Oliviera’s celebrated Mocotó restaurant in São Paulo, including fried Coalho cheese drizzled with molasses, and oxtail with cheesy corn grits made with Canasta. The tasting menu at Michelin-starred restaurant Lasai in Rio de Janeiro boasts a course of four Brazilian cheeses paired with varieties of local honey. And of course, Brazil’s first artisanal shop, A Queijaria, which opened in 2008 and stocks over 150 artisanal cheeses sourced from all corners of Brazil, still draws enthusiasts to São Paulo’s Vila Madalena.

As for when these cheeses will be available abroad, nobody can say for sure just yet. But one thing’s for certain: the secret on Brazilian cheese is out—and it’s only a matter of time until the wider world demands a taste.

The post The Next Big Cheese May Not Come From Europe appeared first on Saveur.

Ramona Niz grabs pearly white mandioca roots by the handful and pushes them through a grinder. The homemade wooden contraption used to extract starch sits outside next to her home in Manantiales, an isolated farming town in the Northeast Argentinian province of Corrientes, where Niz and her family are surrounded by mandioca and corn fields that thrive under the intense summer sun. A few generations back, scenes like this used to be quotidian in every rural home, but an exodus from subsistence farming spurred in part by the proliferation of industrial agriculture has turned many of these machines into mere decoration.

Half a dozen women stand in a semi-circle and watch Niz in awe. They are from the organization Cocineros del Iberá, a network of more than a hundred cooks and food producers from towns and villages that surround the Esteros del Iberá, a 1.3 million hectare stretch of wetlands that cuts through the middle of Corrientes. Members are working to reinvigorate local food traditions, including mandioca, and strengthen the regional economy. In this part of the country, mandioca is both an essential pantry ingredient and the livelihood of farmers and cooks across the region. 

As she works, a metal grater spins thunderously and pulverizes the roots, spitting out thin strips that splatter drops of starch in every direction. During her grandparents’ era, this was a two-person operation. One person had to strongarm the crank to turn the grater, while the other person fed the machine mandioca. Today, a retrofit motor condenses the job of shredding hundreds of kilos worth of mandioca each season. This step is the only part of the process of extracting starch from mandioca roots that the Niz family has mechanized. 

“We do everything by hand,” Niz tells me through a wide smile that never leaves her face. “This is how we’ve always done it.” 

Niz and her assistant Mari Flores drop mandioca by the bucketful into a thin sheet that is folded in half and hung on a clothesline. One of them pours jugs full of water through the sheet while the other agitates the mandioca until the water runs clear. What’s left over is a compacted opaque ball of mandioca, which gets tossed into the pig pen along with fallen fruits and avocado, as well as corn cobs. 

The liquid that collects in a trough below the sheet sits for the afternoon until the starch and water separate. The starchy paste is scooped out and laid onto a sheet of metal under the sun in the front yard. On days when the heat hovers around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the wet starch turns powdery and dry in a day or two. By then, it is ready for making chipá (spelled chipa in original Guarani), a family of cheesy breads eaten from dusk to dawn between swigs of yerba mate.  

In rural areas, mandioca starch is often sold directly by the producer or at the local vegetable shop, but in the nearby provincial capital just two hours away, it’s near impossible to find anything but industrial starch, which includes different mandioca varieties that are mixed together and dried hastily in a giant oven. 

“It isn’t the same at all,” says cook Romina Esquivel, a member of Cocineros. “You can feel the difference in your hands. The dough isn’t as smooth, the chipá isn’t as soft, and when it cools, it turns rubbery and hard.” 

Among the small crowd watching Niz work are Estefania Cutro and Gisela Medina, co-founders of Cocineros del Iberá. In 2016, Cutro, an agricultural engineer, attended a lunch that Medina was catering, and was immediately smitten with a plate of kivevé and chicharrón trenzado, a slightly sweet squash pureé and braided beef confit cooked with lemon and mandarin juice. 

“I always understood that the work I do finishes with a plate of food,” explains Cutro. “I work mostly with farmers but am curious about how that food transforms inside the kitchen. When I met Gisela, I immediately thought, ‘I need to be friends with this woman.’”

Cutro got the idea to organize a formal network of cooks and food producers after attending a conference in the northwest province of Jujuy, a region where a massive tourism industry emerged practically overnight after the Quebrada de Humahuaca—a valley in Northeast Argentina known for its colorful mountainscapes—was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

“The people I met struggled to convince locals to get in early on tourism,” Cutro recalls. At the time of the conference, the wetlands were being turned into a national park and Cutro wanted to make sure local communities could benefit from imminent tourism development whilst preserving their culture. “We knew that the park would attract travelers to the small towns that surround it. It was important to create a formal network that would stimulate a circular economy and unite and give autonomy to local producers and cooks.” 

Together, Cutro and Medina secured funding to equip home kitchens with new ovens, mixers, and refrigerators, and to provide educational resources for proper food handling, accounting, customer service, and business development for transforming informal hustles into proper vocations. Today, the Cocineros del Iberá network has been adopted as a cultural program by the provincial government, and the organization has become the face of food fairs across the region. 

The women of Cocineros and I pack into a few cars with bags of corn and mandioca starches in tow and head to the home of cook and Cocineros member Marcela Acosta in nearby Mburucuyá. There, she and Esquivel treats the group to a Correntino-style banquet: anguyá, a fried mandioca and sweet potato cheese fritter; sopa correntina, a fresh corn and chicken casserole usually reserved for the holidays; classic chipá balls; and chipá mbocá, chipá dough spread onto a branch and rotated slowly over a fire pit until the cheese bubbles and browns. 

“My abuela had a special eucalyptus branch reserved for making mbocá,” Esquivel tells me. ”It was something we ate on the weekends or special occasions. It’s a luxury for everyone but the one holding the stick.” She gestures towards the sun. It’s nearly 100 degrees out. 

The lunch spread is a cross-section of the indigenous Guaraní and Spanish Criollo food traditions that blended into one another in Northeast Argentina and across the border of neighboring Paraguay: mandioca and corn-based dishes that incorporated butter, milk, and cheese when the Spanish brought cattle to the Americas. Such dishes have defined the local diet for centuries. 

Yet, this kind of a feast is an unusual occurrence. Many of these foods are rarely consumed outside the home, and the labor that goes into preparing them is making many varieties of chipá a less common sight at the dining table these days. In the nearby provincial capital and the half-dozen towns I stopped through around Corrientes, I found little more than classic chipá in bakeries, gas stations, and street stalls—sprinkled amongst a sea of restaurants serving steak, milanesas, pastas, burgers, and pizzas, foods that now hold more social currency in the local dining scene. 

The Cocineros’ growing presence in food fairs is helping turn that around. The recent publication of Cocina Correntina, a cookbook edited by Cutro with the Guarani-Correntino recipes of her mentor, botanist and fervent home cook Aurelio Schini Cacace, will hopefully bring Correntino food identity to a national audience. 

“I can’t imagine living anywhere except Corrientes,” says Cutro. “The land, the people, the mixture of cultures, our way of living is reflected completely in our food, and we need to be conscientious about preserving that unique identity.” 

Observing quietly as Esquivel and Acosta grind corn and knead dough is Romina Coronel, a 20-something cook who is the youngest of the bunch—and represents a future that the network is hoping to inspire. More and more young aspiring cooks are coming onboard Cocineros and learning about foods that, in many cases, have been lost in their own homes. “There are lots of foods that my family stopped preparing,” Coronel says. “I call my abuela all the time to ask if she remembers different recipes. I think that she is surprised that I want to learn how to make our family’s dishes.” 

A desire to revitalize the food of their grandparents is just a small part of the mission. Rather than get stuck in nostalgia, Cocineros aims to resuscitate a way of life that values a connection to place and the food borne from it. 

“Food is a social expression,” says Medina in between sips of mate. “It is important for us to tell a story. At culinary school, they don’t teach us Argentinian cuisine, much less regional cooking. This isn’t merely economic or even about creating a good product, it is about telling the story of our home and our culture and all of the people behind it. This food has enormous value.”

Recipes

Chipá (Yuca and Cheese Bread)

Get the recipe >

Chipá Guazú (Cheese and Corn Casserole)

Get the recipe >

Chipá Anguyá (Yuca and Cheese Fritters)

Get the recipe >

The post This Glorious Root Is Northeast Argentina’s Pantry Staple appeared first on Saveur.

The tamal has many faces across Colombia, with different parts of the country incorporating particular starches, proteins, vegetables, and seasonings into their renditions of the leaf-wrapped dish. Chef Alejandra Cubillos González, who was born and raised in Bogotá, grew up eating tamal santafereño, a variety typical of the capital region that usually includes pork, chicken, peas, carrots, and cornmeal, all bound up tightly in wrapped banana leaves. Every year at Christmas and the New Year, her grandmother, who ran a restaurant and cooked all her life, would prepare the dish for the whole family, with relatives helping assemble and wrap each tamal.

After González became a chef herself and began developing recipes for the menu at Sofitel Barú Calablanca‘s Bahía Restaurant in Isla Barú, a former peninsula accessible from the port city of Cartagena, she wanted to represent her native country’s knack for cooking foods wrapped in natural fibers. She also wanted to highlight the local cuisine, which was so different from that of her home region—especially in its bounty of fresh fish.

It was in Cartagena that González first began to cook fish regularly, especially locally abundant varieties such as horse mackerel and various snappers she had rarely encountered before. “Being close to the sea, I can be more connected with local fishermen, learn from them, and discover other types of food,” she says. “They advised me in the best method of cooking for each variety—fried, roasted, or with some sauce.”

To encapsulate some of her new home city’s quintessential foodways in a single dish, González decided that a tamal-inspired parcel would be a great vehicle for showcasing a delicate cut of local corvina. Further drawing on the coastal region’s specialties, she dreamed up a tomato-and-coconut-milk-based sauce—somewhat reminiscent of cazuela de mariscos, or seafood stew, one of Cartagena’s representative dishes—to pour over the fish. A common ingredient in Colombia’s coastal regions because of how plentiful it is, coconut “gives us flavor, moisture, and natural fat that lends texture and aroma,” González explains, adding that the milk also balances out the acidity of the tomatoes.

She wraps the fish and sauce in plantain leaves to “protect the ingredients we have chosen,” noting that the natural fibers concentrate the flavors within and preserve the integrity of the fillings as the dish steams. The leaves also impart their own subtly herbaceous and mildly bitter fragrance into the fixings. González further enhances the aroma by heating the leaves over hot coals prior to wrapping, to infuse them with smoky flavor and also improve their pliability.

“Wrapping dishes in banana leaves was a tradition of our ancestors,” she explains. (“The whole reason for wrapping food, of course, originates in the need to transport it,” according to Mariana Velasquez, author of the cookbook Colombiana: A Rediscovery of Recipes and Rituals from the Soul of Colombia. “In these little packets, you have a full meal.”) Traditional tamal recipes generally include starches like rice, and meats like chicken or pork, but González believed in the versatility of the technique. “To bring it into the present, we decided to apply this wrapping technique to the fish.” 

In the kitchen at Bahía, González opens up the leaves slightly before serving, so that the fillings peek out and aromatic steam billows from the unwrapped parcel. Diners can dig in right away, no unpacking required. Cartagena’s penchant for coconut appears again in the bowl of fragrant coconut rice served alongside the leaf-cradled tamal. And leaves aren’t the only part of the banana on the table: the meal comes with a helping of plantain chips to nibble on while looking out over Barú’s white-sand shoreline and azure waters.

“Through this dish, we pay homage to our traditions and to our ingredients,” says González. “The person who tastes this fish can take a trip through their palate.” 

Recipe

Fish Tamales with Hogao del Pacífico

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Ceviche, lomo saltado, causa limeña—Peruvian food is famous for its bold flavors and melting-pot dishes that draw from African, Asian, and European cuisines. But whether you’re holed up in a fishing village on the Pacific coast or dining atop a jagged peak of the Andes, you’ll find culinary through-lines in a handful of pantry mainstays that define Peruvian cuisine: distinctive chiles, pulses, tubers, and more. 

As part of our SAVEUR Cookbook Club series exploring The Latin American Cookbook (Phaidon, 2021), we asked renowned Peruvian chef and author Virgilio Martínez to spill the beans about the ingredients that are always in his larder, and how we can make the most of them in ours at home. 

Heirloom Potatoes

Thousands of years ago, the Incas were growing potatoes in what is now Peru, yet despite being introduced to Europe through the Columbian exchange, the tuber didn’t catch on there until well into the 16th century. Translation? Peruvians have millennia of experience ahead of most of the world when it comes to spud savvy. Martínez is adamant about looking past the standard Russets and Yukons in favor of heirloom varieties that come in a dizzying array of shapes, colors, and sizes. “Most people have never had a real potato,” he says. Great potatoes are a must in his favorite comfort-food potato dish, papas a la huancaína, in which boiled potato slabs are cloaked in a pale yellow chile sauce enriched with queso fresco and evaporated milk.

$15.79 for a 3-lb. bag of baby purple potatoes, Melissa’s

Corn

The backbone of all Latin American cuisines from the Rio Grande to the southern tip of Chile, corn is the ultimate life-sustaining crop. Its husks swaddle tamales in Mexico and beyond, while its silks are steeped to make a medicinal brew. Corn kernels rich in vitamins and antioxidants can be sliced off the cob and cooked, or dried and milled into meal as the base of countless national dishes, from tacos to pozole to pupusas. The cobs can be used as fodder for livestock, which often finds its way back into corn-based dishes. 

Monoculture and industrialization did a number on corn, just as it did on potatoes, which makes tracking down heirloom varieties a worthy challenge. But for the uninitiated, a can of hominy or a bag of maíz trillado (cracked un-nixtamalized corn) are excellent gateways into a world of Latin corn recipes. The latter stars in a creamy cachaça-spiked mash in Brazil called canjiquinha, one of hundreds of mouth-watering corn recipes to choose from in Martínez’s cookbook.

Peruvian Chocolate

In Peru, where cacao trees grow in abundance, chocolate is not just dessert. “We eat chocolate anywhere, anytime,” explains Martínez. “It’s not a special treat for Peruvians but rather an essential foodstuff.” In Latin American kitchens, chocolate is used in ways some American cooks might find surprising: In Nicaragua, for instance, cacao seeds are pulverized with dried corn kernels and blended into a sweet drink called pinolillo, likely a descendant of the astringent chocolate beverage the Aztecs called xocolatl (literally, “bitter water”). In Peru, a potato stew called carapulcra is finished with grated unsweetened chocolate, while in Mexico, chocolate is an essential ingredient in many traditional moles.

Quinoa

The Incas called quinoa the “mother grain,” and farmers have been planting quinoa seeds in the mountain valleys of the Andes for millennia—long enough to develop more than 3,000 varieties of which scant few are commercialized. Containing more protein than any other grain—and all eight amino acids needed to be considered a “complete” protein—it has only recently caught on outside Latin America. Many American cooks are familiar with quinoa’s reddish and sandy-colored varieties, but Martínez says those are the tip of the iceberg: There are also orange, purple, and black quinoas, each with its own texture and flavor.

Ocas

Oxalis tuberosa is the scientific name for this hardy high-mountain tuber that often has a bright fuschia exterior. A dietary staple in ancient Mayan and Incan societies second only to potatoes, ocas are small and knobby with a starchy interior. They can be tart, sweet, or neutral depending on the variety and how they’re prepared. Curiously, because they thrive in mountainous soils, ocas are popular in New Zealand, where they’re called New Zealand yams. Ocas turn nutty and mild when simmered slowly in chupes (stews), in which they’re frequent bedfellows with other Andean tubers like ollucos (Ullucus tuberosus).

Fruits of the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is the most biodiverse area on earth, with one in every 10 known species of plants and animals found there. Yet surprisingly few Amazonian fruits, vegetables, and herbs are known outside the region. Martínez waxes poetic about the ambrosial properties of passionfruit and açaí as well as lesser-known fruits such as cupuaçu (Theobroma grandiflorum), whose flavor somewhere between pineapple and chocolate makes it a popular base for ice cream and smoothies. You won’t find fresh cupuaçu in the produce aisle, but the frozen pulp is the next best thing.

Chia Seeds

Chia’s sudden trendiness belies the fact that the seed was prized as far back as ancient Aztec and Mayan civilizations. That’s no surprise, considering that it contains a surfeit of healthy Omega-3 fatty acids in addition to protein, calcium, zinc, and fiber—what many aptly call a “superfood” today. A relative of mint, chia seeds are nutty and crunchy when toasted and become viscous like tapioca when blended with liquids. “This tiny seed’s power to turn liquids thick and mucilaginous is amazing,” says Martínez.

Ají Paste

Ají (“chile” in many Spanish dialects) is an essential ingredient in Peruvian stews, sauces, and  ceviches. Ají amarillo (yellow ají) is perhaps the country’s most emblematic single ingredient, lending sweet piquancy and a vivid sunny hue to a wide variety of dishes. “Chuck a spoonful of ají into ceviche, and you’ve got leche de tigre,” shares Martínez, adding that it’s equally delicious stirred into rice or stewed potatoes. Ají rocotó, which is deep red with an earthier flavor than its yellow counterpart, has similar applications; both are easy to track down in jarred paste form (look for ones made in Peru), though Martínez swears by frozen whole ají, which are preservative-free.

Amaranth

Long dismissed as nothing more than a pesky weed in the United States, amaranth is finally getting its due. The plant’s leaves, sweet and high in protein, are delicious in salads, though amaranth seeds are more widely eaten in Latin America, ground into flour for tortillas, boiled whole to make porridge and thick drinks, or toasted and added to breakfast cereals for crunch. In The Latin American Cookbook, Martínez writes that prior to colonization, amaranth was as widespread in the region as corn. “Wherever you use rice or couscous, you can use amaranth,” he says. “It’s especially tasty when cooked like risotto.”

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It took Virgilio Martínez and an army of researchers six years to write The Latin American Cookbook, a 400-page hardcover released in November with 600 recipes hailing from 22 countries. It is the newest, and perhaps most hotly anticipated, culinary bible by Phaidon, the publisher behind such emblematic releases as Japan: The Cookbook, India, and The Silver Spoon. 

Last year, when we heard Martínez was crisscrossing the Western Hemisphere gathering recipes and local lore for an epic Latin American cookbook, we were delighted—and admittedly skeptical: How could a single book do justice to the foodways of an area stretching from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn? 

It sounded like mission impossible, even for a go-getter like Martínez. If Martínez’s name sounds familiar, that’s probably because you met him on Netflix’s Chef’s Table. The soft-spoken phenom from Peru starred in a 2017 episode that charted his trajectory from troubled teen to toqued stagiaire to, today, culinary eminence and lay anthropologist. On the show, Martínez gives viewers an intimate look at Peruvian cuisine—the glimmering Pacific seafood, the sticky Amazonian tree saps, the knobby Andean tubers, and everything in between. 

Now, he brings the rigor and curiosity that won us over on Chef’s Table to The Latin American Cookbook, which is our December/January pick for SAVEUR Cookbook Club. The goal of the compendium, as Martínez states in the introduction, was never to be an exhaustive encyclopedia of Latin cooking but rather a “culinary snapshot” with dishes that can be adapted freely to suit personal preferences and available ingredients.  

The recipes run the gamut from international hits like black bean soup and Colombian arepas to lesser-known gems like Chilean disco fries and Bolivian schnitzel dolloped with rocotó-tomato salsa. “Christ’s knees,” we learn, are hot, yeasty buns from the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca bursting with queso fresco and streaked with blood-red achiote oil. There’s even a section on cooking ants, grasshoppers, and palm weevil larvae—ample proof that Martínez is determined to give it to us straight. As he explained to us via video chat, this is, happily, not another Latin-“light” cookbook for the mainstream American market. Here is our interview with Martínez.

You grew up in Lima, Peru’s capital. What foods did you love as a kid? 

Some of my earliest food memories are of ceviche. It was street food, not trendy or elaborate like it can be today. We also ate a lot of stews like carapulcra, which is made with pork and potatoes, and ají de gallina, made with chicken and yellow chiles. To me, Peruvian comfort food smells like onions and chicken stock and melted cheese. These platos de olla (dishes from the pot) were always incredibly flavorful, which I’d later learn was because they incorporated ingredients and techniques from different cultures: African, Portuguese, Spanish, Creole… 

So, some dishes people would call Peruvian are in fact a product of many cultures. 

Yes, and that’s true of Latin American cuisine as a whole. Latin America is a gigantic pantry, filled with different types of corn and potatoes, cacao and coffee. We also have the oceans to play with, with all their bounty. The influence of various cultures over the last 500 years created a fusion cuisine, and to me, the epicenter of that melting pot is Lima. In Lima, food is filling and exploding with flavor. Nothing is watered down. There are no kids’ menus, no plain pasta or potatoes. Fast food arrived late in Peru. For us, fast food was the street vendor ladling out ceviche or soup.

The Latin American Cookbook—that’s an ambitious title! Were you overwhelmed by the task of compiling a book so broad in scope? 

I took the responsibility of writing such a book seriously, but I didn’t overthink it and got right to work. Because of Mater Iniciativa, our research arm, I was already in contact with cooks, farmhands, grandmothers, food writers—people who, in sum, could contribute to making something truly great. I knew what I didn’t want to do was write another book of Latin American comfort food with a few pretty photos and call it a day. We made a point to go deeper. We’d ask people across the region what they ate when they were little, what crops they grew, and what was important to them about each particular dish. And I have to admit, I couldn’t have done this alone. It helped that I had a whole team behind me along the way.  

How would you describe the recipes in the book? 

We started with over 1,000 recipes and winnowed the list down by about half. It’s a book for home cooks. There are simple recipes you can make in 20 minutes. We included many emblematic and traditional dishes and also some newer ones, since the dishes that the current generation loves will likely become classics in the near future. 

What do people most often get wrong about Latin American cuisine?

That it’s all meat and potatoes. The potato part really gets me—you have no idea how many varieties of potatoes there are, and how nutritious they can be. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t just make you fat. They are filled with vitamins and can taste like one corner of the Andes or another depending on their origin. 

What changes are afoot in Latin American cuisine? What does the future hold?  

At fine-dining restaurants in Japan, in the middle of an elaborate tasting menu, they’ll give you, like, a slice of perfectly ripe mango. And that’s the course. In Latin America I think we can learn to give our native ingredients this same reverence and respect. Imagine the same treatment, except instead of a mango it’s a pitaya cactus.

While stitching these diverse food cultures into the patchwork quilt that is this book, did anything strike you as a common thread?

The ingredients may change from region to region, but the sense of community is palpable wherever you go in Latin America. In Guatemala, when families gather for a funeral, they make a point to cook and get tipsy together. One person chops the carrots while the other plucks the chicken for soup… This idea of a family unified around food, paying tribute to their lost brother or sister—it’s priceless and beautiful. I’d even call it innovative: How many families do you know that cook together? What would society look like if we were more collaborative in this way? 

What surprised you the most over the course of your research? 

The willingness of people to help. Every time we reached out to someone for a recipe, some information, or whatever we needed, the answer was always a resounding “¡claro que sí!”  That says a lot about the pride Latinos have in their food. 

Where do you think that pride comes from? 

When something is yours—meaning, you grew up with it, and you know it inside and out—you want to share it with the world. I think it’s a natural human impulse. People everywhere are passionate about their food, but in Latin America it takes on a different dimension because food is so present. And perhaps there’s something to be said for the lack of recognition for producing and exporting some of the world’s favorite foods and recipes. We want to say, look where your chocolate and tacos and coffee are coming from.  

Will there be a sequel to The Latin American Cookbook? 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned on this journey, it’s how little we know about our own history in Latin America—how certain ingredients arrived here, and how others were sent abroad. It’s nice to realize that there’s still lots to uncover. You know you’ve done a project justice when you can step back at the end and say, “¡Caramba! I’m ready for more!”

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