Curanto
¡Epa! I’ve managed to skip the whole of June. Since we’ve been back in the Big Smoke, I’ve been embroiled in getting my permanent residency and getting a full-time, in-house job here in Buenos Aires. Lots of paperwork later, and both boxes are ticked. Hooray!
Before we left Bariloche behind, the famous curanto had to be tried. Originally from Chiloé, curanto has seeped across southern Chile and across the border into Argentina. Bariloche’s Colonia Suiza, the Swiss Colony, is the place to eat the smokey results of meat and vegetables cooked snugly between hot stones, leaves, blankets and earth in a deep hole underground…
The cooks with their shovels…
The layers of sacking are removed to reveal the steaming leaves…
The food is carefully lifted out of its toasty hot bed and divvied up between the hungry diners who have been staring at the spot the treasure was buried beneath for some time. We had beef, pork, chicken, sausage and possibly lamb, and among the vegetables there were sweet potatoes, carrots, regular spuds, butternut squash, pumpkin and probably onions.
Instead of eating in the small village hall, that had the feel of an old people’s home dining room, we sat on a table outside instead and quickly gobbled up the tender meat and veg before the sun dipped and we turned blue. A small group of dogs surrounded us, stared and begged silently, the most persistent resting his chin on my knee and eyeing me sadly with his one eye.
glad you experienced this there – quite a particular location.
Yes, very. Tasty underground food 🙂
That looks yum! What sort of flavour did the leaves impart? How long did it cook?
I love the way dog’s do that… x
It was a delicate smokey taste but more leafy than hard smoke, if you get what I mean… Hard to describe! I suppose like bay leaf but more gentle in taste. Would have liked to have taken more time over eating it but it was nippy outside so we wolfed it down, surrounded by dog stares. It cooked for a couple of hours underground I think x
Yum!