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Culinary Travels in Costa Rica: Part 1
We hiked through rainforests and gasped at volcanoes, lounged on white sand beaches and wound our way around perilous mountain passes. Oh yes, we also ate. I just returned from six days in Costa Rica, one of the many ecological jewels of Central America, and aside from taking in an almost unfathomable level of sheer natural beauty we ate our weight in tropical fruits, fresh ceviche, and, of course, rice and beans.
Hit the jump for more.
It's difficult to describe just how important the combination of rice and (black) beans is in the culinary life of Ticos. Calling it a "staple" somehow doesn't do it justice -- it neither projects forcefully enough the integral nature of the dish to the country, nor does it give enough credit to the range of preparations and flavors produced from a relatively humble meal. Make no mistake: Ticos are proud of their national dish. This is, after all, a country who three years ago entered into a strange competition of pride with Nicaragua, submitting a 5000-pound batch of rice and beans as proof of their starchy superiority.
At the many thousands of "sodas" (inexpensive, roadside restaurants) dotted across the countryside, rice and beans is dished up in massive, siesta-inducing quantities. It's the main attraction of casado, a massive plate usually heaped with salad, fried plantains, a variety of root vegetables like yucca or potato, and sometimes meat, which can be the stew-like carne en salsa or simply a piece of roasted chicken. The rice and beans though, are always present. The rice is always plain, but the beans are often doctored with peppers, cilantro, onion, or lime.
There are as many variations of casado as their are homes in the country; the only rules is that everything on the plate works to compliment the rice and beans. The salad can be a loose shred of cabbage mixed with tomato and onion, or, as we had at one sleepy soda off the main drag in San Ramon, a mince of raw plantain marinated in lime juice and cilantro. (Unfortunately I didn't get to snap a picture of that meal: it was the first we had off the plane and my camera battery was dead, naturally).
At another soda, the plate came with the strange combination of Chinese-style noodles, grilled skewers of chicken, and long strips of fried plantains.
Vegetarian platters (almost every place offered this) usually came with a slab of queso fresco, a fresh cow's milk cheese. Sometimes it was raw, other times the cheese was grilled to a crisp on the outside, enabled by it's almost tofu-like texture and ability to be heated without melting.
The other feature of every soda was the bottles of salsa that lined the tables. These salsas are basically what we'd call hot sauce, but there is a staggering variety of them, owing to that many sodas have their own distinct recipe. Tomorrow I'll talk a little more about these hot sauces plus a way to fashion your leftover rice and beans into breakfast. Think: Frijolecakes! (Not really, but that would be fun.)
Culinary Travels in Costa Rica: Part 2
Yesterday I talked a little bit about Costa Rica's plato tipical, casado - and more specifically, rice and beans. Now, when you're producing rice and beans in such quantities as to make it the central aspect of a plate, you're bound to have some leftovers. Like cold pizza or breakfast burritos, Costa Ricans adapt these heaps of leftovers into gallo pinto: a saute of black beans and rice along with cilantro, onion, and pepper. It basically becomes a flavorful sort of fried rice, turned black or light brown by the natural sauce of the beans. Gallo pinto is served primarily for desayuno (breakfast), but I did find it later in the day at a few places.
Whether it's breakfast, lunch or dinner, every restaurant or soda you walk in to is going to have two bottles of salsa on the table. The first is Lizano salsa, a sauce so ubiquitous you have to wonder if there's any alternate uses for it other than consumption. Aside from tasting like a pretty damn interesting (in a good way) mixture of sweet and sour, tabasco, and curry, my guess is the yellow-and-brown-flecked sauce is also used to lubricate car parts, degrease stove tops, and sterilize wounds. Actually, it's quite good on a makeshift breakfast taco constituted by gallo pinto, sour cream, and eggs wrapped inside a corn tortilla. I even poured a bit in corvina ceviche, turning the pearly tiger's milk into an attractive beige. I heard the somewhat dubious claim that Lizano salsa is Costa Rica's most requested export. I couldn't substantiate that, but you can purchase bottles of the stuff from online retailers at a slight cost hike.
The other salsa likely to grace a Costa Rican table is simply a Louisiana-style hot sauce made with tabasco peppers. Unlike Lizano, there's no real standard here, and many sodas you find will even make their own. I tried a wide number of hot sauces -- some super fiery and perhaps inflected with a hotter variety of chili such as scotch bonnet, some thick and syrupy like a colloid, some thin and runny like name brand Tabasco.
My favorite, though, was a pretty spicy, thick sauce homemade by the proprietor of this beach-side soda outside of Manuel Antonio. It landed somewhere in between Lizano and a hot sauce, but it was so much better than both: tons of garlic, cilantro, and other dried spices; a distinctive West Indies-style curry flavor; a thick base reminiscent of wet-rub jerk sauce, probably the result of pureed onion and scallions. It was amazing stuff; reminded me quite a bit of another stellar, homemade hot sauce I picked up years ago in Carmel, California.
The gold-toothed senora that ran the soda -- busy manning an outsided grill holding a wide array of chicken, pork ribs, and odd cuts of beef steak -- was reluctant to part with a bottle. But a with a little persuasion, she sold me a 20oz ketchup container filled with the stuff. I've been eating it with my eggs in the morning ever since.
Sometimes, good things come in mislabeled packages.Culinary Travels in Costa Rica: Part 3
I'm going to wrap up this short little porthole into Costa Rican cuisine talking a little bit about everything -- probably in a very rambling, tangential sort of way. Just a fair warning.
Native fruit is definitely one of the more unique aspects of eating in Costa Rica. You've got your average tropical fair, of course, including bananas and oranges and mangos and guayaba (guava). but then you've got oddities like this:
That disgusting looking spewdum of goo and seeds is a granadilla, and it's perhaps one of the most nectary-sweet, delicious fruits you're going to find in Costa Rica. Yes, it feels like half-melted Jello in your mouth; like the forest's answer to raw quail egg. But there is something faintly, well...erotic about supping on the life-giving goo within the fruit. Obviously someone else thought so too: the granadilla is just one very-ugly-but-tasty variety of what's referred to as passiflora ligularis, or passion fruit.
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On the right here is some Costa Rican papaya, which we ate almost every morning with breakfast. This variety isn't really too sweet; rather it has sort of a gamey pungency. I ate it with bites of pineapple or watermelon, but I didn't like it too much on its own.
Here's a lemon served with a piece of fish at a soda; only it's not exactly an ordinary lemon. It was like a cross between a lemon and a tangerine, slightly sweet but mostly very sour. I didn't get an exact answer on the variety, but I think what we're dealing with is a Panama orange, popularly known as a calamondin in Asia.
We also ate a bit of carambola, or star fruit. The variety in Costa Rica is shockingly sour. Remember Warheads? Yeah, like that. I could only eat it in small bites or mixed in with sweeter fruit or even bananas.
You didn't only have to eat your fruit in whole form. Batidos, a sort of fruit-infused milk shake, were very popular all across Costa Rica. Miamians have probably had the Cuban version of the drink, which is largely the same. It's basically ice, fruit, and lots of milk, blended until smooth and frothy. They're extremely refreshing on a hot day. This one is a guava batido... hard to tell, eh?
Of course this isn't fruit at all... but I was just talking about refreshing, and nothing refreshes like some Costa Rican cerveza. My favorite, not pictured because I was always too drunk to remember to take pictures of it, is Imperial. But Pilsen is nice too - basically, Costa Rican beers are mostly crisp, light lagers similar to dozens of other Central and South American lagers. If Bud or Miller or any other crap American lager were half as crisp and tasty and light as these beers we'd be in better shape.
A little bit more about sodas:
I just wanted to take a brief moment to elaborate on the soda, Costa Rico's answer to the food counter. These small restaurants are the backbone of Costa Rican cuisine. They're not fancy and they're not necessarily creative. They are, however, where hard-working people eat every day. Where a huge plate of comforting, home-cooked food will cost you only a couple thousand colones or less. (Under $4) But the most interesting aspect about the sodas to me was not just how many thousands are scattered across the countryside, doing very much the same thing in close proximity to each other yet still retaining a loyal and vibrant customer base, but how much pride the folks manning them were.
Every soda I went to was spotless. The workers - almost exclusively women - wore bright, clean clothes and tucked their hair away in cute, white caps. This might be simple, cheap food, but it's their food. The small sample of sodas I experienced made me wonder about our American equivalents, the ethnic eateries that dot strip malls across South Florida, and why many white Americans are almost afraid to check them out. It really gave me a renewed sense of vigor to dive into our little "sodas" and find out just how proud our immigrants are to be bringing the foods of their homelands to us.
/off soapbox
Pura vida, folks! Thanks for reading. I'll leave you with a few pics of Costa Rica's breathless landscape. (Click for larger versions)
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