Fricasé de Cerdo

Name: Fricasé de Cerdo
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 3 h
Total time: 3 h 30 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: La Paz & the Bolivian Altiplano
Ingredients: 1.5 kg pork ribs and shoulder on the bone, in large pieces; 3 litres water; 8 dried ají amarillo, deseeded and soaked, or 6 tbsp ají amarillo paste; 1 onion, roughly chopped; 8 garlic cloves; 1 tbsp ground cumin; 1 tsp dried oregano; 4 tbsp lard or oil; 2 slices stale white bread, crusts removed; 300 g dried white hominy (mote), soaked overnight; 200 g chuño or 4 waxy potatoes; 2 tsp salt, or to taste; 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper; 1 handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped

La Paz's yellow pork broth, driven by ají amarillo and thickened with bread, served over hominy and potatoes as a Sunday morning cure

Origin: La Paz & the Bolivian Altiplano

From the journey of Chilli Pepper.

Fricasé paceño is a bright yellow pork broth from La Paz, and the yellow is the point: it comes entirely from ají amarillo, the fruity Andean chilli that Bolivians call ají amarillo or ají de color, blended raw into a paste with garlic and cumin and cooked out in fat before the water goes in. Nothing else in the pot has any colour to give. The name comes from the French fricassée and is one of a set of eighteenth and nineteenth-century culinary borrowings that arrived in the Andes and were rebuilt from the ground up. Very little of the French dish survives beyond the word: this is pork on the bone simmered for hours, thickened with stale bread rather than a roux, and served over mote, the large hominy of the altiplano, with chuño, the freeze-dried potato, alongside. It is Sunday morning food and, specifically, hangover food. La Paz eats it early, and the combination of a great deal of hot broth, fat, chilli, and starch at altitude is understood locally as medicinal. Stalls open before dawn in the Rodríguez market and the pot is generally finished by mid-morning. The two starches are not interchangeable and both belong on the plate. Mote is maize hominy, boiled soft and faintly sweet; chuño is potato that has been alternately frozen on the altiplano at night and trodden and dried in the sun by day, a technique the Andes has used for well over a thousand years, and it tastes of nothing much on its own but takes up broth like a sponge.

Ingredients

Pork

1.5 kg pork ribs and shoulder on the bone, in large pieces

Broth

3 litres water

Chilli base

8 dried ají amarillo, deseeded and soaked, or 6 tbsp ají amarillo paste
1 onion, roughly chopped
8 garlic cloves
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tsp dried oregano

To cook

4 tbsp lard or oil

To thicken

2 slices stale white bread, crusts removed

To serve

300 g dried white hominy (mote), soaked overnight
200 g chuño or 4 waxy potatoes

Seasoning

2 tsp salt, or to taste
1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

To finish

1 handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Method

Soak the hominy overnight, then boil it in plenty of unsalted water for an hour and a half to two hours until the grains have split and gone tender. Salt it at the end.
If using chuño, soak it in several changes of water for at least four hours, then squeeze it dry and boil for thirty minutes.
Blend the soaked ají amarillo with the onion, garlic, cumin, oregano, and a splash of water to a smooth paste.
Fry the paste in the lard over a medium heat for eight to ten minutes, stirring, until it darkens, thickens, and the fat separates and runs orange at the edges.
This frying step is not optional. Raw chilli paste tastes green and harsh; fried until the fat separates it becomes deep and fruity, and it is what the whole pot rests on.
Add the pork and turn it in the paste until every piece is coated, then cook for five minutes.
Pour in the water, add the salt and pepper, and bring to a bare simmer, skimming for the first ten minutes.
Simmer, partly covered, for two and a half hours, until the pork is falling from the bone and the broth has reduced by about a third.
Soak the bread in a ladleful of the hot broth, blend it smooth, and stir it back into the pot.
Bread is the traditional thickener here rather than flour, and it gives body without dulling the chilli.
Simmer for a final fifteen minutes and taste for salt; it should be assertively seasoned and distinctly hot.
Serve in deep bowls with a piece of pork, a ladle of broth, a spoonful of hominy, and the chuño or potatoes alongside, scattered with parsley.

Notes

Ají amarillo is the entire dish, so use the real thing: dried pods or the bottled paste from a Latin American grocer, not cayenne, which is hot and flat where this is hot and fruity. Fry the paste until the fat separates. Bread, not flour, for the thickening. Mote is large white hominy and is sold dried; it needs an overnight soak and up to two hours of boiling, so start it before anything else. Chuño is worth seeking out for the texture, and waxy potatoes stand in. Like most broths of its kind it is better on the second day.

The Gastrographer

Mapping Culinary History

To explore — select an ingredient below.

To explore — select an ingredient below · click any location dot on the map for recipes and stories · browse the information panel on the right · trace the full journey on the timeline.

Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control