Puerto Rican Dishes

Hello all!

For those of you that don’t know, I am a licensed tour director and I recently spent 10 days touring around Puerto Rico, in particular Viejo San Juan.  It is a fascinating little city full of lots of history.  It’s only about 7 square blocks and known as the Walkable City – that fact helps the fact that it is almost impossible to park there.  Ladies, do yourself a favor and leave the high heels at home.  The streets are paved in cobble stones and the side walks are about 24 inches wide at best.

Chica

P.S.    Here are some tidbits that I got from Wikipedia and I’ll share all of the restaurants I visited while on tour under different posts, my favorite recipes, as well as highlight the best of Puerto Rican cuisine.

Puerto Rican cuisine has its roots in the cooking traditions and practices of Europe (Spain), Africa and the Amerindian Taínos. In the latter part of the 19th century the cuisine of Puerto Rico was greatly influenced by the United States in the ingredients used in its preparation. Puerto Rican cuisine has transcended the boundaries of the island and can be found in several countries outside the archipelago.

Puerto Rican dishes are well seasoned with combinations of flavorful spices. The base of many Puerto Rican main dishes involves sofrito, similar to the mirepoix of French cooking, or the “trinity” of Creole cooking. A proper sofrito is a sauté of freshly ground garlic, tomatoes, onions, recao/culantro, cilantro, red peppers, cachucha and cubanelle peppers. Sofrito is traditionally cooked with olive oil or annatto oil, tocino (bacon), salted pork and cured ham. A mix of stuffed olives and capers called alcaparrado are usually added with spices such as bay leaf, cumin, sazón and adobo.

There are plenty of staples in their cuisine and here are just a few:

• Albondigón – Puerto Rican meat loaf.
• Albondigas - meatballs
• Alcapurrias – made from a mixture of mainly yautía and may contain ground squash, plantains, green banana and other starchy tropical tubers filled with ground meat or seafood and deep fried in oil.  They are made different here in the US and in Dominican Republic. 
• Almojábanas – cheese-flavored rice fritters.
• Arañitas – a combination of fried ripped and unripened shredded plantain, seasoned with salt, garlic and spices. Squash and other tubers can also be added.
• Arepas / Domplines – These are fried rounds of flour-based dough. Sometimes they can contain coconut (known as arepas de coco). They are sometimes stuffed with seafood. This dish is particular to the Eastern and Southern parts of Puerto Rico.
• Arroz con habichuelas – Literally “rice and beans”, this dish is so common that the phrase “rice and beans” means essentially the same as “our daily bread” in northern countries. Pink and red beans are the most common. The beans are cooked together with recaito base, stock, chunks of ham, potatoes and/or calabaza (tropical pumpkin), alcaparrado, tomatoes sauce (to thicken stew), and flavored with spices. When done the beans are then ladled over a mound of rice. Sticky medium-grained rice is more popular in Puerto Rico than long grain rice.
• Arroz con pollo – Chicken and rice cooked in the same pot. Traditionally chicken is seasoned with adobo. Then placed in a pot with rice, annatto oil, sofrito, stock, beer, olives, and capers.  This an extrememly traditional dish and I am quite surprised it is not considered as the national dish of Puerto Rico.
• Bacalaítos – These are fritters made from a pancake-like batter containing codfish, flour, and seasoning.
• Buñuelos – Yam fritters.
• Canoas – Ripe plantain “canoes” stuffed with ground meat and covered with melted cheese.
• Carne Guisada – Puerto Rican beef stew
• Chicharrón – My favorite.  Basically can be fried meat or poultry.  Check out Daisy Cooks for her Chicharron de Pollo.  Love it!!!
• Cuajitos en salsa (Buche) – Puerto Rican dish made with pork belly in a red hot sauce
• Empanadas – Breaded steak (beef / turkey / chicken / veal)
• Empanadillas de carne / mariscos / queso / guava – Meat, seafood, cheese, or fruit turnovers usually called “empanadas” in other Spanish-speaking countries. On the eastern side of the island empanadillas are known as pastelillos, although pastelillo also refers to a pastry turnover.
• Escabeche
• Fricasé – Hearty and spicy (chicken / turkey / rabbit or goat) stew with potatoes, beer / white dry wine or red wine, olives, capers, peas & carrots.
• Guanimes – Semi-sweet tamales, wrapped in banana leaves.
• Jibarito – Plantain sandwich (traditionally made with steak or pork).
• Mofongo – a popular dish made from fried green plantains or fried yuca, seasoned with garlic, olive oil and pork cracklings, then mashed. Mofongo is usually served with a fried meat and a chicken broth soup. It is really super easy to make and sticks to your ribs.  Mofongo made from ripe plaintains is called Fufu. (I just learned that…)
• Mondongo (Menudo) – Pork tripe stew. I know it sounds weird but I Love it!!!!
• Morcilla – A type of spicy and hot blood sausage.
• Piononos – Fried filled ripe plantain rolls.
• Pollo frito – Puerto Rican style fried chicken
• Rabo encendido – Spicy and hot oxtail stew.
• Salmorejo – Crabmeat stew.
• Sancocho de patitas – Hearty pork feet stew with starchy vegetables, plantains, and Garbanzo beans.
• Sorullos – Fried corn meal logs (much like little tamales), sometimes stuffed with cheese.
• Taquitos – Puerto Rican “Chimichanga“.
• Tortilla – Puerto Rican style omelette.
• Seafood – On certain coastal towns of the island, such as Luquillo, Fajardo, and Cabo Rojo, seafood is quite popular, although much of it is imported. Only a tiny number of fishermen ply the waters off Puerto Rico today, and their catch never leaves their seacoast towns. The fact that the island sits next to the deepest part of the Atlantic means there is no wide continental shelf to foster a rich offshore fishery; neither are there any large rivers to dump extra nutrients into the sea that could build up a fish population. Popular seafood include bacalao (codfish), chapín (tropical fish), pulpo (octopus, not always canned), carrucho (conch), camarones (shrimp), langosta (lobster) (most commonly caught in the surrounding waters), and jueyes (crabs).
• Tostones – twice fried plantains originated in the south of Puerto Rico. They are now a popular dish all over Latin America and Caribbean.

Holiday dishes

• Arroz con dulce – Puerto Rican rice pudding. It is notable that in Puerto Rico rice pudding is made with coconut milk and coconut cream as apposed to only bovine milk or cream used elsewhere. Other flavors in to Arroz con Dulce include cloves, ginger, raisins soaked in rum, vanilla, cinnamon, brown or white sugar, heavy cream or milk and sometimes lemon zest.
• Arroz con gandules – it is a yellow-rice-and-pigeon-pea dish with alcaparrado (capers and olives stuffed with red peppers), and pieces of meat (bacon, smoked ham, smocked turkey or chorizo). The spices and seasoning usually include of cumin, bay leaf, annatto oil, sofrito, banana leaf, dry oregano, thyme, and stock. It is part of Puerto Rico’s national dish along with pig roast.
• Coquito – A popular Christmastime drink is coquito, an eggnog-like rum and coconut milk-based homemade beverage. The holiday season is also a time that many piñas coladas are prepared, underscoring the combination of pineapples and coconuts seen in Puerto Rican cuisine.^[7]
• Ensalada de pulpo – Octopus salad is the most common salad on a Puerto Rican Christmas tables. Common ingredients added are black olives, orégano brujo, garlic, olive oil, cilantro, peppers, red onion, lemon juice and red wine vinegar or white wine vinegar.
• Pasteles – For many Puerto Rican families, the quintessential holiday season dish is pasteles, which English-speakers often literally translate to “pies”.   Pasteles are not a sweet pastry or cake, but a soft dough-like mass wrapped in a banana or plantain leaf and boiled. In the center of the dough are choice pieces of chopped meat, shellfish, chicken, raisins, spices, capers, olives, sofrito and often garbanzo beans. Puerto Rican pasteles are similar in shape, size, and cooking technique to Latin American tamales. The dough in a tamal is made from corn meal; while in a Puerto Rican pastel it is made from either green bananas and/or starchy tropical roots. The wrapper in a tamal is a corn shuck or a banana leaf; the wrapper in a Puerto Rican pastel is a banana leaf. Pasteles also use different spices than tamales. The making of pasteles is a labor-intensive social activity. Many family members will get together for hours or days to make dozens to hundreds of pasteles to share with friends and loved ones. Pasteles from the Island are often shipped overseas packed in dry ice during the long Christmas season. They are received as a nostalgic, much treasured gift.

 

• Quesitos – cheese pastries