Chifrijo

the San José bar bowl invented in the 1990s: rice under saucy red beans, crisp chicharrón and pico de gallo, eaten with tortilla chips

Origin: San José & Costa Rica

From the journey of Beans.

Chifrijo is a portmanteau of chicharrón and frijoles, and unusually for a national favourite its invention is recent, local, and documented well enough to have been litigated. Miguel Ángel Cordero created it at his bar in La Uruca, San José, in the early 1990s as something to serve with beer, and later registered the name as a trademark. The registration was contested by other restaurateurs on the grounds that the word had become generic, and the dispute ran through the Costa Rican courts for years. Cordero's authorship of the dish is not seriously disputed; what was at issue was whether anybody else could call theirs by the name. The assembly is fixed: rice at the bottom of a bowl, saucy red beans over it, crisp pork chicharrón on top, and pico de gallo of tomato, onion, coriander, and lime over that, with avocado and a wedge of lime, eaten by scooping with tortilla chips. Nothing is stirred until it reaches the table. The beans matter more than the name suggests. They are cooked soft and left saucy, seasoned with sofrito and cumin, and they need to be loose enough to soak into the rice without being a soup. Costa Rican cooks use red beans here rather than the black beans of gallo pinto and casado, which is a genuine distinction and not an accident. It is bar food and it belongs to a specific setting: the neighbourhood bar of the Central Valley, where a bowl arrives with a beer and is shared. That it appeared in the 1990s and was national within a decade says something about how quickly a good idea moves in a small country.

Ingredients

Beans

  • 300 g dried red beans, soaked overnight, or 700g cooked
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 1 red pepper, finely chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • 2 tbsp oil
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste

Chicharrón

  • 600 g pork belly, skin on, in 2cm cubes
  • 1 tbsp salt
  • 1 orange, juiced

To assemble

  • 300 g cooked white rice

Pico de gallo

  • 3 tomatoes, in 5mm dice
  • 1 red onion, in 5mm dice
  • 1 handful coriander, chopped
  • 2 limes, juiced
  • 1 chilli, finely chopped

To serve

  • 2 avocados, sliced
  • 200 g tortilla chips

Method

  1. Cook the soaked beans in unsalted water for an hour to an hour and a quarter until soft, keeping the liquor.
  2. Soften the onion, pepper, and garlic in the oil for ten minutes, add the cumin, then add the beans with enough of their liquor to make them saucy.
  3. Simmer for fifteen minutes and season. They should pour slowly from a spoon rather than sit in a mound; too thick and the rice underneath stays dry.
  4. Toss the pork belly cubes with the salt and orange juice and leave for twenty minutes.
  5. Put the cubes in a heavy pan with a splash of water, cover, and cook over a low heat for thirty minutes until the fat has rendered and the meat is tender.
  6. Uncover, raise the heat, and fry the cubes in their own rendered fat for eight to ten minutes until the skin blisters and the edges go dark and crisp.
  7. Drain them on paper and salt them again while hot. The chicharrón has to be genuinely crisp, because it will sit on a wet bean sauce.
  8. Make the pico de gallo: mix the tomato, red onion, coriander, chilli, and lime juice with a good pinch of salt, and leave it for ten minutes.
  9. Warm the rice and divide it between four bowls.
  10. Ladle the beans over the rice, then pile the hot chicharrón on top.
  11. Spoon the pico de gallo over the chicharrón and lay the avocado alongside.
  12. Serve at once with tortilla chips and lime, and do not stir it before it reaches the table.

Notes

Red beans, not black; the black bean version is a different Costa Rican dish. Keep the beans saucy. Render the pork slowly under a lid before frying it hard, which is what gives crisp skin and tender meat rather than one or the other. Assemble at the last moment and serve immediately, since the chicharrón softens within a few minutes of meeting the beans. Pico de gallo is made fresh and drains if it sits, so mix it no more than half an hour ahead.

The Gastrographer

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