Aida Lugo McAllister nonetheless remembers the primary time she tried Puerto Rico's unofficial nationwide dish.
“Once I went to Puerto Rico, 1970, at age 17, that's after I had my first mofongo. And it was heaven,” she remembers. “A mountain of this mashed plantain with items of pork in a sauce. Scrumptious.”
Mofongo is the primary meals individuals carry up once they discuss in regards to the island, says Lugo McAllister, a Puerto Rican residence prepare dinner who has printed recipes on her web site Aida's Kitchen and in her bilingual cookbook, Aida's Kitchen a lo Boricua. A wealthy, starchy mash of fried inexperienced plantains, garlic, butter, and chicharrón (pork cracklings), it's the right accompaniment to broths and stewed meats. Rising up in Gary, Indiana, Lugo McAllister and her household didn't have prepared entry to inexperienced plantains, so she didn't strive mofongo till she moved to the island as a teen. However the dish's impression on her was speedy.
“So scrumptious, so moist, and it got here in a mortar,” she remembers. She has since printed recipes for a “healthier” mofongo (sans pork cracklings) on her web site and YouTube. Lugo McAllister is joined by influencers everywhere in the web who fry and mash plantains in wood mortars. “If you consider Puerto Rican gastronomy, I'm certain that the very first thing you consider is mofongo,” says the content material creator Natalia Bercero on TikTok, earlier than whipping up the dish for her followers.
Although it has modern enchantment, mofongo's roots are deep. The dish displays the intertwined histories of African, European, and Indigenous individuals in Puerto Rico. Taíno individuals, native to the Caribbean islands, used a pilón, a wood mortar and pestle, to grind ingredients together. Their civilization was flourishing earlier than Christopher Columbus arrived within the Caribbean in 1492. Quickly after, Spanish colonists attacked and enslaved the Taíno, placing them to work in gold mines and plantations. So many Taíno died underneath colonial rule that the Spanish introduced enslaved West Africans to the island to switch their dwindling workforce.
In West Africa, cooks have lengthy ready fufu, a dish of plantains, yams, or cassava that's boiled, then mashed. Enslaved Africans introduced that very same approach to Puerto Rico. In addition they launched plantains, which grew simply on the island and have become “the principle supply of meals for the slaves and the poor individuals,” stated Lugo McAllister, who moved again from Puerto Rico to Indiana in her mid-20s.
Plantains are carefully associated to the banana, however of their inexperienced, unripe kind, they're not candy, and can be utilized as a impartial starch much like a potato. Over time, African cooks mixed plantain-based fufu with European elements like garlic, butter, and chicharrón for taste and moisture. The late meals historian Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra wrote in Consuming Puerto Rico: A Historical past of Meals, Tradition, and Identification, that the phrase “mofongo” comes from an Angolan Kikongo time period, “mfwenge-mfwenge,” which suggests “a large amount of something in any respect.
However that doesn't imply mofongo is a breeze to make. “It's a meals that's most popular eaten at a restaurant,” stated Lugo McAllister. “Due to the various steps concerned.” Even some Puerto Rican eating places avoid making the dish due to the quantity of elbow grease concerned in smashing plantains. Nonetheless, mofongo is a cornerstone of Puerto Rican gastronomy, and every restaurant prepares it in its personal approach. Some serve it in a pilón for additional flare. A soupy essential course is often served on the facet or in a properly in the midst of the mound.
In Kissimmee, Florida, the place greater than half of town's 85,000 residents are of Puerto Rican descent, there's no scarcity of fine mofongo. The cooks at El Cilantrillo, a Kissimmee restaurant recognized for scrumptious cooking, enormous parts, and dwell music, put together a very good one. “I'll say that I am a mofongos tester,” stated Yannick Jordan, a Puerto Rican-raised undertaking supervisor for the corporate of eating places that features El Cilantrillo. “El Cilantrillo's continues to be my favourite mofongo that I've ever tried.” On the softer facet, with a powerful garlic taste, their mofongo is available in a pilón bearing the restaurant's title, and will be ordered full of all the pieces from octopus to Inconceivable Meat. It's their finest vendor.
As with every nice dish, mofongo has seen its justifiable share of spinoffs in recent times. Artistic cooks in Puerto Rico and the mainland try their very own takes on garlicky mashed plantains. There's Lugo McAllister's vegetarian mofongo, for instance. For a festive appetizer, cooks form smaller quantities of smashed plantains into little cups and fry them to make “mofonguitos” that they fill with meat.
El Cilantrillo is a purveyor of one other mofongo innovation: trifongo, a mofongo made with a trifecta of inexperienced plantains, yuca (cassava), and maduros (ripe, candy plantains). Lugo McAllister stated that when she first skilled mofongo within the Seventies, trifongo was unusual.
The yuca in trifongo is a mildly candy, starchy tuber cultivated by the Taínos that's now a staple all through Latin America, Asia, and Africa. El Cilantrillo's trifongo comprises no chicharrón, and will get some additional moisture and umami taste from rooster broth and seasoning.
Lugo McAllister says that in terms of making mofongo, the problem is in getting the feel proper. “It must be moist however not greasy,” she says.
Yuca and plantain are all considerably dry as soon as they're mashed, so it's the job of the prepare dinner so as to add fats and liquid to moisten them. “In case you do not put fats or some kind of liquid, oh my god, you will not have the ability to even swallow it,” Lugo McAllister warns. Historically, cooks would derive moisture from butter and chicharrón, however many trendy mofongos, like El Cilantrillo's trifongo, are moistened with broth and olive oil. To forestall your self from overdoing the fats, Lugo McAllister says so as to add it little by little, tasting to see when the feel is to your liking.
In the end, the purpose isn't a puree, however somewhat a mash with loads of crispy chunks. Lugo McAllister recommends smashing the starches whereas they're nonetheless sizzling from cooking, as a result of they develop into a lot more durable to govern as soon as they quiet down. In case you don't have a mortar and pestle, you possibly can put the starches in a stainless-steel bowl, cowl them with a kitchen towel, and pound them with a mallet. Putting them in a plastic bag and smashing them with the flat backside of a cup or a pan can work, too.
Lastly, there's the flavour. Yuca and inexperienced plantain are fairly bland, so salt, garlic, and different seasonings are essential. “It's alleged to have numerous garlic taste,” Lugo McAllister stated. Her wholesome tackle mofongo contains cilantro, and El Cilantrillo's will get a taste enhance from adobo, a mix of salt and spices like garlic, pepper, oregano, and turmeric that many Puerto Rican cooks maintain available. Some cooks make it at residence, but it surely's additionally out there ready-made in supermarkets.
The adobo, plus the dance between inexperienced plantain, candy plantain, and cassava makes El Cilantrillo's trifongo something however bland. The yuca and maduros add a dimension to mofongo that isn't ordinarily there, Jordan stated. “The cassava is extra salty. Candy plantain, in fact, is sweeter. So it is like an explosion in your mouth of those two totally different flavors.”
