Growing up on the island, his grandmother would make the dish on special occasions. Juan José Cuevas, the executive chef at 1919, a restaurant at the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, also has a soft spot for mofongo. “You need to make sure that it’s not mashed all the way through, so that when you bite it you still have all that flavor and crispy texture,” he adds. Finally, he adds some garlic, chicharrón and other ingredients to taste. “The steam will come out and start cooking everything else,” he says. Then, usually in a pilón (mortar and pestle), he smashes the plantains while they are still hot. After soaking them, he deep fries the plantains until they are crunchy on the outside. To make the dish, Correa first peels the green plantains and puts them in water to preserve their color. It’s very time consuming, and it’s as if you were martillando comida.
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Many people know how to do it, but not everyone wants to. “It would surprise you, but not a lot of restaurants in San Juan offer mofongo. “It’s a heavy meal, so you don’t eat it on a day-to-day basis-like rice and beans,” says Correa. Traditionally (and ideally, according to Correa) it is eaten alongside a bowl of chicken broth. It can be presented different ways and include various ingredients, such as meat or butter. Nowadays, it is sometimes served as a main course. Mofongo is not a very fancy dish-unless you make it so. It usually consists of fried green plantains mashed with garlic, chicharrón (deep-fried pork skin) and cilantro. To Correa, Puerto Rico’s unofficial national dish is “celebratory,” something you might crave when “you feel like having a cold beer or piña colada” or that might appear at a Sunday brunch. “And we’re afraid it won’t be.”Ĭhef Raúl Correa is the co-owner of BACOA Finca + Fogón, a restaurant focused on sustainable cuisine in Juncos, Puerto Rico. “If we have to make it, it has to be perfect,” he says. Mofongo is not on BACOA’s menu because the dish is so labor intensive that it would require one or two employees to focus all of their time on it. It was all in that dish, all the good stuff.”
“Xavier used to make a mofongo, and on top he would put a pork belly with some guarapo ,” Correa says. His fondest memory of the mashed plantain dish, however, is one he shares with his co-chef and colleague Xavier Pacheco at BACOA Finca + Fogón, a restaurant in Juncos, Puerto Rico, that the BBC has speculated might just be America’s best. Growing up, on Friday afternoons, he and his family would sometimes go to the island’s East Coast to enjoy fish, octopus salad and, of course, mofongo. A Puerto Rico native, he developed his passion for food while watching his uncle cook.
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