The Andes: Ecuador’s highland kitchen
Two lines of volcanoes run the length of Ecuador. Between them sit Quito, Cuenca and the market towns, and a cooking built on potatoes, corn, pork and cheese.
- Spanish name
- La Sierra
- Cities
- Quito, Cuenca, Riobamba, Otavalo
- Staples
- Potato, corn, pork, cheese
- Altitude
- Quito sits around 2,850m
A kitchen shaped by altitude
The Andean valleys are cool all year, even on the equator. Food here is warming and filling: soups at almost every meal, corn eaten a dozen ways, and pork roasted whole for markets and family celebrations. Potatoes were domesticated in the Andes, and Ecuadorian cooks still use several kinds for different jobs, floury ones that collapse into soup and waxier ones that hold their shape.
Corn is the other foundation. Mote is large-kernel white corn, soaked and boiled until tender and served alongside almost everything. Tostado is the same family of corn toasted in a pan until it crunches, set out on the table like nuts. Fresh sweetcorn, choclo, goes into soups and humitas, which are steamed in their husks.
The dishes to know
- HornadoRoast pork, marinated overnight and cooked slowly until the skin crackles.
- Locro de papaThe everyday potato and cheese soup of the highlands.
- LlapingachosPotato cakes with a cheese centre, served with peanut sauce.
- Colada moradaPurple-corn and fruit drink for the Day of the Dead.
The table, not just the plate
An Andean meal is rarely one dish. Hornado arrives with llapingachos, mote, curtido (a quick pickle of onion and tomato in lime) and a bowl of ají, the fresh chilli sauce found on every Ecuadorian table. Ají in the highlands is often made with tree tomato, a tart, egg-shaped fruit sold in the UK as tamarillo.
Going there
Quito’s old town is one of the best-preserved colonial centres in Latin America, and the Mitad del Mundo monument just north of the city marks the line the country is named after. The road south through the Avenue of the Volcanoes passes Cotopaxi and Chimborazo, whose summit is the point on Earth’s surface farthest from its centre, because of the planet’s bulge at the equator. Further south, Cuenca is a calm colonial city and a centre of the toquilla straw hat trade, the hat the rest of the world wrongly calls a Panama.
Markets are the easiest way into highland food. Otavalo’s is the best known for textiles, but the food stalls in any town market will have hornado, soups and fresh juices from early morning.