I went to Puerto Rico. Here’s what I learned
Reposted from Do Not Disturb, Hannah is Eating
My wonderful cousin Ian got married two weeks ago in Puerto Rico. I had been before — Ian’s father (and my uncle) Carlos is from PR, and we had visited as a family in 2015-ish, back before I was interested in food and what it has to say about a culture. Now, I know better.
I figure that while my silly old voice can be entertaining and all, I might as well take this opportunity to include the perspective of my family members who know a bit more about Puerto Rican food. My uncle Carlos, who lives in Minnesota now, kindly allowed me to interview him about the wonderful things I ate (and failed to eat) in PR. So with his guidance, let’s talk about some traditional Puerto Rican foods.
The first thing that was clear to me upon my arrival in PR (this time, at least) was how big a role plantains play in Puerto Rican cuisine. Carlos tells me that plantains are an absolute staple: this banana-shaped fruit is used in savory and sweet dishes all over Puerto Rico because it is starchy, filling, and super available.
Well, usually it’s super available. While we were visiting, there was (and still is!) a shortage of plantains. The shortage is because of Hurricane Fiona, which hit PR in September of 2022 and caused flooding all over the island, killing a bunch of crops. Fiona came only five years after the deadly Hurricane Maria, which killed thousands of people, left many more without electricity for months, and forced a mass exodus of people from Puerto Rico in its immediate wake. While Fiona wasn’t as devastating as Maria, it caused much more widespread flooding — as a result, no plantains, and a retraumatized population.
There are three main dishes that are made with plantains offered in pretty much every restaurant in PR. The first is tostones, a fried plantain chip. To make tostones, you take green plantains (the non-sweet ones), fry ’em, smash ’em to your desired thickness, and then fry ’em again. (They’re *super* healthy.) These chips are thick, more like a french fry than a chip, and very filling. They are served with dipping sauce — Carlos told me that different areas of the island use different sauces, and that his favorite is called mojito isleño, a tomato sauce with a secret recipe.
Carlos says that whenever you’re eating in a seafood restaurant, tostones are a must. His favorite tostones and special secret dipping sauce are served at a restaurant called La Barca located in Salinas, where his mother and his accountant used to live. “When I would go see my accountant, on the way back, I would always stop [at La Barca],” he said. “And all I would have, to be honest with you, was tostones and a couple beers. You could eat eat, I dunno, three servings, easily.”
The second main way Puerto Ricans eat plantains is in the form of maduros, a caramelized sweet plantain. These may have been my favorite thing I ate on the island — they’re like candy. Supremely addictive, especially when dipped into mayoketchup, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Maduros and tostones are both side dishes; the main plate that plantains shine in is without a doubt mofongo. My core memory of PR from the first time I visited is listening to my other uncle, Tom Vellenga, repeat the word “mofongo” over and over. I can’t blame him — mofongo is #1 fun to say and #2 delicious. The concept here is that you take plantains that are still green, cook them, mash them up with seasonings (heavy on the garlic!) and crispy pork chicharrones, and then form the resulting mush into a mound. This is the mofongo base; to have a complete meal, you need to add some type of stewed meat, like the chicken below.
Carlos’s favorite Puerto Rican delicacy is churrasco, a long, thin flank steak originally from Argentina. According to him, the best churrasco on the island was from a place called Che’s, which closed after Hurricane Maria. Carlos said, “You gotta visualize Che’s, right? Che’s was, like, this old style restaurant. They were no women who were worked there, it was sort of strange that way. They always wore black pants and they all had Argentinian white and blue shirts, with the horizontal stripe. And the same guys who were there when I was a kid were still there when we were going there before Hurricane Maria. It was like they would be there for life… It was like you were in a time warp.”
Churrasco remains his favorite thing to eat in Puerto Rico, even though Che’s has closed down: “If I don’t have that when I go to Puerto Rico, then I wasn’t in Puerto Rico.”
Puerto Rican street food also encompasses more dishes than I have space to list. Bacalaitos, a large, pancake-shaped mixture of codfish and dough, is a highlight; and the chicken skewers above are going to haunt my dreams for months. Carlos is also a fan of alcapurrias, a street snack made by grinding up several starchy veggies and fruits into a dough, tucking some land crab (jueyes) or ground beef into the center, and then frying it up into a dumpling-esque form.
He warned me that although lots of people think of Puerto Rican cuisine as uniformly unhealthy, food in PR is just as varied as in other parts of the world. Sure, PR has its fair share of deep fried foods, but the cuisine isn’t just stuff that’s going to make your cholesterol spike. Carlos says, “It’s an art form. There’s painters, there’s photographers, there’s sculptors, and there’s chefs.” He points to Jose Enrique, a Puerto Rican chef who has a restaurant named after himself, as one of those practitioners of art — in 2013, Enrique was named a semifinalist for the James Beard Foundation Awards, becoming the first Puerto Rican to have gained such international renown.
The only dessert I got to sample while I was in PR was piragua, a shaved-ice dessert that I personally learned about from listening to the In the Heights soundtrack incessantly when I was at the peak of my theater-girl era. In “Piragua,” Lin Manuel Miranda mentions several times that the piragua guy has a “new block of ice;” and although I must have listened to this song (and sung along) several hundred times, I never imagined him toting around a literal ice block. As you can see above, though, that’s how traditional piragua is made: there’s a massive ice cube that the man in charge shaves down into ice shards, and then glazes with flavoring. I had a coconut whiskey piragua and felt like a giddy mix of child and adult.
Back in Minnesota, Carlos says that he stays connected to Puerto Rican food in several ways. His wife Charlotte makes a great carne guisada. He goes to the one local Puerto Rican restaurant to pick up 24-packs of pasteles and pigeon rice “by the bucket.” He has found community even in the insane cold of Minnesota: he told me that if his friend Maritsa ever invites you over for dinner, “you just cancel anything that’s on your calendar.”
There you have it — everything I learned about Puerto Rican food while also reveling in the glory of a wonderful wedding. Thank you to Carlos for speaking to me, and Ian for inviting me to share in his day. If you’ve read this far and you feel so inclined, consider donating to the Disaster Relief’s Hurricane Fiona Relief fund — incredible Puerto Rican food isn’t possible if the people who create it aren’t safe.
Next newsletter, I’m going to be reviewing the frankly phenomenal food I’ve been eating since I moved back to Brooklyn. Stay tuned!
With love,
Hannah
