Eating Chile: Part One

Hey Hey! How are all of you foodies!? Happy to be with you again! This is going to be a series of posts telling you about our great 3-month gastronomical trip through Chile! 

First, I would like to tell you a little about this amazing country. I’m not going to bore you with demographic details but it’s important for you to know that Chile is a country located on the west coast of South America with about 4.000 km of coasts of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a very long and narrow country bordering with Argentina, Peru, and Bolivia. It has many different kinds of climates, going from desert in the north, to ice fields in the extreme south and everything else in between! This makes this country very diverse in its gastronomy, with amazing seafood and meats all around its territory.

Santiago

We arrived in Santiago, the capital city. As a big city, here you can find food from all the different regions of the country. I usually when I arrive here I try to eat very, very traditional foods in very traditional restaurants. This time we tried CAZUELA which is a soup, prepared with potatoes, pumpkin, rice, carrots, corn and meat which could be chicken, beef or turkey depending on the taste. An absolute must if you are visiting the country. We also tried PRIETAS CON PAPAS COCIDAS, basically blood sausages with boiled potatoes. You wouldn’t believe how good is to mix all together and have a bite!

Dichato

Our next destination was Dichato. A very small beach town about 45 minutes away from Concepción, the second biggest city in the country an about 550 km south of Santiago. In my opinion, this is the area where you can find one of the best seafood in the country. Here we tasted PAILA MARINA, which is a seafood soup prepared with white wine, which includes, razor clams, clams, mussels, piure (the rock seafood), abalone, shrimps, a piece of fish, potatoes, onion and a few more amazing ingredients depending on the cook! This is un-be-lie-ba-ble. You can’t miss it if you are around this area of the country. We also had EMPANADAS MACHA QUESO, which is a razor clam-cheese pastry and PONCHE DE ERIZO, which is a sea urchin punch…yes, you read it well, a seafood punch, prepared with sea urchins, white wine, pisco (Chilean spirit made from grapes), eggs, sugar, and cinnamon. Wierd but very, very tasty.

Valparaíso

OMG Valparaiso. Great views, great people, great food! This city is the main port of Chile. It has some really great seafood! The highlight of this visit was a restaurant called Tres Peces, Here we tried two of their top dishes, CALDILLO DE CONGRIO which is a traditional Chilean soup made with conger eel, cream, potatoes, and onion among other amazing spices and ingredients. Out of this world! This dish is so freaking good that even the poet Pablo Neruda, a famous Chilean Nobel Price winner wrote an ode to this dish (you can check the original and English version here). The other one, REINETA A LA LATA, Pomfret fish prepared in a tin with cheese, cream, white wine all in the oven….uhf, delicious.

To be continued…