The TH Food Lab: Puerto Rican Comfort
I made mofongo, a staple among staples in Puerto Rican cuisine
Mexican food is a reflex. You put anything vaguely Latin in front of someone, and you shouldn’t be surprised that they turn into the anime meme guy asking if the butterfly was actually a bird. Granted, I think a lot of that ignorance has mellowed over the years thanks to YouTube, Food Network, and smartasses on social media eager to correct someone. Still, I can’t help but feel most Latin cuisine is underexplored. Churrascaria has blown up, sure. Peruvian pollo al la brasa is charging up the trendiness scale. Still, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone say that empanadas are “good Mexican food,” even now.
Puerto Rico gets the shaft a lot, but folks who think it’s just some island that can’t decide whether it wants to be a state or not (the geopolitics there aren’t simple, I’m just relaying what I see to be common arguments from people) miss out on culture and people. Part of that culture is the amazing food that those people have made for hundreds of years: tostones, pernil, flan, papas rellenos. They even have their own take on the empanada. However, the thing I fell in love with the most in my dalliances with Puerto Rican cooking is mofongo.
To understand mofongo, you need to imagine the banana, only imagine it less sweet. Why would you want to do that? Because at its base, it is a starch. You like starches. Everyone likes starches. Even people who don’t each starches like them; they just have to shun them because eating too many complex carbohydrates is a surefire shortcut to weight gain if you’re not active enough. Even if you are, starches don’t build SICK GAINZ like protein does. I understand that mindset; I just could never live that mindset. Anyway, if you take the sugar out of the banana, you get the plantain, and plantains are central to Caribbean cooking, whether in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, or anywhere in those barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
The plantain can be used in many different applications. You can fry them, smash them, and fry them again to get tostones. You can turn them into doughballs that you cook into a dish called fufu. You can even ripen them and fry them for a side dish or a dessert. However, mofongo is the height of what you can do with this cousin of the banana. Mofongo is simply fried plantain cut into chunks and then mashed with garlic and crispy pork – generally a chicharron but sometimes bacon if pork skin is not available – in a wooden mortar and pestle. The first time I had it was from a food truck in New Jersey. They served it with slow-roasted pork shoulder (pernil) and fresh pico de gallo. It was so rich and garlicky that I was hooked and have been chasing that high ever since.
As fate would have it, mofongo is incredibly easy to make. I made it with dinner last night for my son and me. First thing’s first, I started out with three unripen plantains. Why green? When they ripen, they get too sweet and mushy. I cut them into one-inch chunks and then peeled the skin off. Don’t be fooled by what the skin looks like. Plantain peels are far more fibrous and tougher to remove than banana skins. Next, I chopped up four or five (I wasn’t keeping count) rashers of bacon and put them in a non-stick pan. In my trusty cast iron, I put enough vegetable oil in for a shallow fry and plopped those plantain chunks and several cloves of garlic to cook for eight minutes approximately (four per side). In the future, I think I’ll just roast the garlic instead for textural purposes and to get more of that garlic flavor in the dish. It wasn’t that the dish was bad; the garlic just didn’t pop the way I wanted it to. If you aren’t Italian or a fiend for the stinky rose like I am, go ahead and fry the cloves. You’ll still get that flavor without becoming a walking vampire WMD.
After the plantains were done frying, I started mashing them with the garlic and bacon. My mortar isn’t huge, so I had to do it in batches. With each batch, I added a pinch or so of kosher salt for flavor. Most chefs will tell you to season in levels. For mofongo, I felt that the salt would get lost in the oil during the fry but would adhere well in the mashing stage. Judging by both mine and my son’s reaction to it, I made a good call. Texturally, it had that roasted potato thing going with lots of bits of crunch. The flavors were off the chart. However, mofongo is generally a side dish. Although, like the Action Cookbook Newsletter, we are fans of sides here, mofongo generally goes with something. I took a chicken breast out of my freezer with the aims on doing, well, something with it. I was thinking about fiddling with the Foreman or the Instant Pot, but I already had the trusty cast iron out with oil in it. Why not make some cutlets?
For the breading, I kept it simple yet tried something new. Again, you know I’ve been watching Facebook reels lately. I’ve seen guys just throw chicken in a bowl and then break an egg in there with it and mix it up by hand. Then rather than taking it out and putting it in a separate dish, they just throw the breading agent in with it. I chose cornstarch, no flour, no breadcrumb, just cornstarch. I also seasoned it with sazon, because I had to keep some semblance of island flavors in there. With meat, again, my mantra is TEMPERATURE, NOT TIME. I got it to 165ish degrees F and got each piece out. The result was perhaps my best shot at frying chicken yet, which makes this an accidental piece of research into my chicken sandwich chronicles. The chicken resembled what you get in Chinese food, which is good. There’s a reason why everyone loves General Tso and sesame chicken.
To round things off, I made a fresh cabbage salad. I got a small bag of pre-shredded red cabbage, cut up a quarter of a large yellow onion, and grated a carrot into a bowl. I added a splish-splash of apple cider vinegar, some kosher salt, and chili lime seasoning. One healthy mix later, and I had a bright, acidic, colorful dish to round out my meal.
But the real star was the mofongo, and why not? Puerto Ricans are like Italians in that they are proud and protective of their cuisines for good reason. Everyone has a grandmother who made pernil on the holidays or an aunt who brought a homemade flan to Sunday dinner. Think of mofongo on the level of a marinara sauce. It’s quick and simple to make, and it highlights fresh and plentiful ingredients. Even if you don’t want to make it yourself, you owe it to yourself to seek out Puertorriqueño cuisine in your neighborhood. It’s a rich and vibrant world that will bring appreciation to an oft-maligned island and culture.