Hundreds of pulsing, red, oyster-esque entities live within small nooks and crannies inside the coarse, spongy, rocklike carapace. You simply scoop them out with your fingers, squirt lemon or lime juice on them to both season and coincidentally stun the creatures (which, by the way, are alive and suctioned to your fingers), and pop them into your mouth. These little guys taste like a fish’s rear end dipped in iodine. Not surprisingly, after a few bites, I loved it.
As strange as piure is, the item that sticks out most in my mind for sheer selfish eating pleasure is picoroco. This tubelike barnacle looks more like a minivolcano than like food. Throw these puppies on the grill and they essentially cook in their own shell. Ideally, you can place the shells directly on the coals underneath the grate.
Picoroco, a giant barnacle, can be found living on the rocky shores of Chile and has the shape of a miniature volcano.
Once the barnacle is cooked, poke inside it and you’ll find a white piece of meat that looks like a crab claw but tastes like lobster. You can eat this straight out of the shell, but often picoroco is found in soups. A bowl of cold tomato gazpacho filled with pieces of steamed picoroco is one of the most refreshing dishes you’ll find on a hot day. Words to the wise: Don’t hover over the grill too much if you are roasting them fresh. These little treats often become so hot that they explode, with seawater, pieces of barnacle, and hot shell spewing all over the place. Dodging a geyser of boiling-hot barnacle liquid isn’t exactly the most comforting thing in the world, but it adds a sense of danger to the eating experience, which I like.
THE BEST PLACES TO EAT
With access to such fresh and abundant ingredients, it’s not surprising Santiago offers incredible dining. The influx of Mapuche Indian and European influences shapes Santiago’s highly regarded restaurant scene. From fine dining to street food, this city’s got it covered, and I can’t recommend a destination as one of my all-time faves without talking about some of my best-loved restaurants.
Picada Ana María is a humble little restaurant off Santiago’s beaten path. A picada is Chile-speak for a casual restaurant—nothing overly fancy—serving simple, home-cooked meals. However, Picada Ana María gained so much popularity that they kicked the business up a notch, creating a full-service restaurant—complete with white tablecloths.
Ana María won’t disclose how long she’s been cooking, but she’s probably in her fifties, looks forty, and refuses to put her kitchen in the hands of anyone else. We ate eight or nine dishes there that were just spectacular. One in particular was the roasted partridge in a rosemary and honey sauce. While Ana María serves some fantastic salads and meat dishes, she’s earned a reputation for serving incredible seafood, specializing in abalone.
Abalone are giant sea snails that live in thick shells adhered to rocks, usually in cold waters. Harvesting this meal is not an agreeable task. You have to sink into icy water equipped with a heavy iron bar to pry the abalone from the rock. Interestingly, this mollusk doesn’t naturally grow in Chile, yet through aquaculture it is rapidly developing as a top industry. Chile is currently the fifth-largest producer of cultured abalone in the world, with 304 tons harvested in 2006.
Abalone are sea snails that look like mussels or oysters. They’re also called “ear-shells” for their oval shells, and can be used as decorations. Personally, I prefer to eat them.
When it comes to food preparation, abalone is known for its stubbornness and tough texture. Much like octopus, it’s a type of dish best eaten raw, or you have to cook the heck out of it. Anything in between is inedible. Some chefs will tenderize it first, beating the meat over and over to break the muscle down. You can easily get carried away using a mallet and cutting board to tenderize the abalone, but you risk losing product or damaging the flesh.
Ana María has developed a unique method I had never encountered before. First, after placing five or six small fist-size pieces of abalone into a rubber tube, one of her prep cooks takes the ends as you’d hold a jump rope and smashes the tube on a cement sidewalk behind the kitchen. It’s genius: The abalone doesn’t go anywhere, because the centrifugal force keeps it in place. The amount of power delivered through the reverberation tenderizes the muscle in just a few smashes.
Next, the abalone are cleaned, trimmed, washed, and steamed. I tasted them cold and poached with a homemade lemon mayonnaise. These were easily the most tender abalone I’ve ever tried—definitely worth the flight to Santiago all by themselves.
I also sampled two versions of Ana María’s pink razor clams. Until this trip, I’d seen these clams only in Japanese restaurants. Housed in an ovaloid, triangular shell with rounded edges, the clam is a beautiful pale pink color; one corner of the muscle is almost a fiery red, and the hue recedes into a gentle pink as the flesh goes deeper inside the apex of the shell. I ate them raw on the half shell with lemon, olive oil, and a bit of minced vegetable, as well as pan-roasted with white wine, garlic, and parsley. A simple, light, and delicious combination.
VALPARAÍSO
It’s almost impossible to find a bad meal in Chile—with ingredients that fresh, meals need little fooling around with. The country’s ultimate seafood spot might be Valparaíso. The actual city is a huge and industrial affair, outfitted with one of the largest port systems in the Southern Hemisphere. However, a short drive outside the city brings you to fishing villages like Quintay, where you can watch boats coming into sleepy little coves carrying their seafood to local restaurants. Luckily, in Valparaíso there are many young chefs who pride themselves on their commitment to local food. The best conger eel I ate the whole week we were there came from a little restaurant called Café Urriola. Six seats, one chef, huge props. I’ve said it before, and I will certainly say it again: If seafood is your thing, Chile has got to be your country.
MY OTHER LOVE: PORK
I am nearly as wild about pork as I am about seafood. To me, pork preparation is an art form. However, with something so widely consumed around the world, it’s hard to say that one bite of pig is any better than another.
I’ve experienced some really special porky goodness on a global scale, and it seems there is no shortage of ways to prepare this delicious creature. In Cuba, I enjoyed a pig finished with palmiche, the little fruits of the royal palm tree. I’ve dined on suckling pigs roasted to perfection in a three-hundred-year-old Madrid restaurant. I gorged myself on wild boar hunted down by Samoan tribesmen and buried with hot rocks covered with scraps of lamb fat for basting. The memory of whole roasted kahlua pig, cooked at a traditional Hawaiian luau underneath giant hot lava rocks with pulpy pounded roots of coconut palms, could never be wiped from my mind. These huge globs of vegetal matter dripped their sugary sap onto the heated rocks, which in turn gave the meat a sweet caramel flavor that, in my book, has never been replicated.
Pork barbecue occupies a whole different realm in the annals of swine artistry. So many cities are renowned for their special style of barbecue. The Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest is the United States’ pinnacle ’cue event, a time when the whole city becomes ground zero for the world’s greatest barbecue talent. Kansas City, Missouri, may be considered the barbecue capital of the world, with biggies like Danny Edward’s Eat It and Beat It, Earl Quick’s, Gates Bar-B-Q, Arthur Bryant’s, and Jack Stack, to name a few of my faves, all fighting for top honors in a city built on pork and beef BBQ.
PUERTO RICO KNOWS ITS PORK
However, not one of those incredible experiences will ever measure up to my personal favorite. It didn’t come from Hawaii, Samoa, Vietnam, Spain, or any of the other swine-centric hot spots around the globe. Surprisingly enough, it’s the Puerto Ricans who make all other pork-worshiping cultures seem tame by comparison.
The Puerto Rican hillside village of Guavate serves as an epicenter of pork meals. Located an hour-and-a-half drive outside of San Juan on Route 184 (known colloquially as the Pork Highway), Guavate is a great illustration for my theory that venturing out to the last stop on t
he subway is the best way to find the best foods, leaving the tourist traps in the dust and opening your mind to a more honest and authentic experience. Most of the time, the reward is a better meal, some smug satisfaction, and a better story when you get back home—at a minimum.
Guavate is inundated with lechónerías (roadside cafeterias whose specialty is seasoned, whole-roasted pig). Traditionally, the pig was roasted over an open flame mounted on a wooden spit called a varita, but these days, a steel spit is used.
In Guavate I expected a little neighborhood with a couple of restaurants. Instead, I discovered a Puerto Rican village that lives and breathes lechón asado, roasted whole pig. On a Sunday afternoon, you share the pilgrimage to this pork mecca with hundreds of Puerto Ricans and clued-in tourists alike, who dine on the area’s specialty and dance away the afternoon and evening to live salsa music.
A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
Guavate restaurateurs are evangelical when it comes to the pig. In no place was this more evident than at El Rancho Original. This lechónería has spent generations perfecting the lechón asado process. The chefs finish the pigs on an orange, nut, and fruit diet. Once the animals are slaughtered, they are placed on giant wood-fired and wood-assist rotisseries, then turned for hours until every single part of the animal is perfectly cooked. Back in the day, the restaurant’s reputation caused quite a stir throughout Puerto Rico and other Guavate restaurateurs cashed in, opening their own eateries along the same dusty little main street.
Today, about a dozen lechónerías line the street, serving food cafeteria-style. Grab a tray and select a cut: pork belly, pork ribs, pork shoulder, pork chops, cheeks, ears, tails, hocks, and cracklings. The quality of the meat is fantastic—sweet, succulent, sticky, and fatty. The availability of so many different parts of the pig was the most exciting aspect of the meal. Any pig part is fair game, and you can pick a little bit of everything if sample platters are to your liking. The chefs simply place pig quarters on wooden chopping blocks. All you have to do is point to the piece you want. If they’re running low, no sweat, they’ll just grab another pig from the back. They are cooking them nonstop in a hell-bent pig-heaven tribute to your waistline expansion.
As fast as people can line up and fill their trays, the BBQers keep cooking up and slicing pig. In fact, at Christmastime, some of the restaurants have been known to go through nearly seventy pigs in a single day, each weighing in at roughly a hundred pounds. Of course, no Latin meal would be complete without fresh and plentiful sides. Beans, rice, cooked greens, yucca with garlic mojo, fried plantains—you name it, you get it alongside your pork.
Pick a spot under an open, breezy shelter created to protect diners from rain or the blazing sun, and plant yourself with your tray. Grab a napkin and dig in.
On Saturdays and Sundays, salsa bands perform while people eat, dance, and chat the day away. As rich and filling as the lechón asado is, the dancing certainly helps burn it off. Take a few bites of pork shoulder, get up and dance three or four numbers, sit back down, splash a little more chili sauce onto your barbecued pig, take a few more bites, and repeat. Oddly, while there are dozens of lechónerías to choose from, everyone is at El Rancho Original. You’d think the competition would be fierce, but it’s a one-horse town as far as I am concerned.
Heladería de Lares
While the Puerto Ricans do a phenomenal lechón, I also have to give it to this small island when it comes to ice cream. Nothing beats helado (Spanish for ice cream) on a hot Caribbean day, and few people in the world do it better than Heladería de Lares. I’ve heard they have anywhere from five hundred to over a thousand flavors in their repertoire, but in any case, this shop is stocked with some amazing flavors. You could go with plain ol’ vanilla or mint chocolate chip, but these guys are known for some seriously wacky creations. Here are my favorites—in no particular order:
Arroz con habichuelas: Rice and beans
Bacalao: Codfish
Zanahoria: Carrot
Batata: Sweet potato
Maíz: Corn
Ron: Rum
Coquito acanelado: Coconut flavored with cinnamon
Pollo: Chicken
Cerveza: Beer
Aguacate: Avocado
Camarón: Shrimp
Ajo: Garlic
Jengibre: Ginger
Heladería de Lares is located about an hour west of San Juan. Take Route 129 into Lares, then turn into the center of town. It’s in the town’s central square.
Unless you’re eating a whole little baby suckling pig by yourself, you’ll never have the opportunity to sample so many flavors on one plate. The rich and fatty belly is so much more toothsome than the leaner, luxury cuts like the chops. Compare that to the earthiness of the legs or to the way-too-rich-for-your-own-good cheeks. There’s no doubt in my mind—if I had to eat pork in only one place, it would be in the little hillside town of Guavate, Puerto Rico.
DON’T FORGET ABOUT DRINKS!!
Beverages often provide a pleasant surprise—or an unpleasant one. In Bolivia, I sampled peanut juice for the first time, and it’s something that I don’t recommend to anybody. In Otavalo, Ecuador, I sipped aloe tonic, and I went through a struggle of grand proportions to keep that down. It’s a nasty, bitter liquid filled with gel scraped from giant leaves of the aloe plant. At one point, I had a sticky, gooey strand extending from the pit of my stomach to the glass that held the elixir. That was when I almost lost it. I politely explained to the lovely aloe vendor that her drink must be an acquired taste, then quickly palmed it off on an elderly woman, who chugged the entire glass down in a matter of seconds.
I love kvass, a drink they practically give away on the streets of St. Petersburg. Called “baby beer” by the locals, this near-nonalcoholic beer is made with rye bread, and everyone from kids to the eighty-year-old babushkas drinks it. The Russians have a very strange relationship with alcohol.
Kvass must be stored in a bottle, in a horizontal position, in the coldest possible place—ideally over ice. It is one of the national drinks of Russia.
I’ve had more types of chicha poured into a cup and thrown my way than I could ever begin to count. It seems every Latin American, South American, and Caribbean country has its own version, as do many African countries. Chicha is essentially a puree of water and some type of root vegetable, usually cassava or yucca, or maize. The drink is mildly alcoholic—maybe one one-thousandth of a percent—because it sits and ferments, and it is extremely fortifying, supplying a lot of healthful benefits from a probiotic standpoint.
From a psychological standpoint, I find a lot of these drinks challenging. I’ve seen families chew up two or three pounds of root vegetables, spitting the wet, masticated by-product into a giant pot of water, where it begins to slowly ferment. Families graciously offer you a glass of their homemade brew. At the end of a long, hot day, downing a glass of this stuff sounds like the last thing I’d want to do. However, no one ever said sharing food and experiencing culture is automatically easy, and with each brain-cramp-inducing gulp, I just chalk it up to a hard day at the office.
Despite some less-than-ideal beverage experiences, every once in a while I come across a drink that just flips my trigger. Usually, it’s the simplest stuff. The coffee in Nicaragua or Ethiopia’s and Taiwan’s teas are arguably the best in the world. I lost my mind over Ethiopia’s mango smoothies—no ice cream, yogurt, or ice, just a puree of massive, juicy, fiber-free mangoes. Served chilled in a glass with a straw, this is a tremendous drinking pleasure. And I can’t forget drinking fresh coconut water straight from the shell in the Philippines; it quenched my thirst like no other beverage. Skyr shakes in Iceland, avocado shakes in Chile—every country has some killer quaffables.
A TWIST ON SODA POP
However, when it comes to satisfying drinks, I’m a self-proclaimed soda pop junkie. Despite all these natural, one-of-a-kind experiences, I recall a bottled commercial soda pop beverage as being my all-time favorite.
On the road,
especially in hot climates, I down water like it’s going out of style. There’s always that Stay hydrated, stay hydrated mantra replaying in my brain. At the end of my first day in Tanzania, I was just thirstier than I’ve ever been and way over drinking more water. In the afternoon we settled in at a small café in Arusha, and a waiter asked me if I wanted a Stoney. I’d never heard of such a thing. He looked at me and asked, “You’ve never heard of Stoney Tangawizi?”
With that, I demanded a Stoney immediately, if for no other reason than it had the most fun name I’ve ever heard. This oversize brown bottle, which looked like the old-school 7UP bottles, soon sat on the table in front of me.
The curvy bottle stood fourteen inches high, the thick glass sanded down around the outer edges, worn from being racked and cleaned so many times and refilled. And there on the side, in beautiful enameled letters, it said “Stoney Tangawizi.”
Tangawizi is the Swahili word for ginger. This popular ginger beer is a product of Coca-Cola. There is a Stoney Tangawizi Facebook fan page.
Most folks opt to sip from the bottle, often with a straw. I like to pour the drink into a glass over ice, or chug it straight. It’s a perfect blend of ginger beer, ginger ale, and a very unfruity 7UP, with a nutty, sweet aftertaste. It has almost a sarsaparilla or root beer quality in the finish. If you’re really thirsty and you’re powering down a whole Stoney, the flavors play in your mouth like a quartet. Stoney is definitely my favorite drink in the world.
Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World of Food Page 14
