Carimañolas

As tradition built it

Carimañolas

Makes about 8. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

• 2 lb yuca, peeled
• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 tbsp oil
• 4 sweet peppers, diced
• 1 tomato, diced
• ½ onion, diced
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 tbsp tomato sauce
• to taste salt
• to taste pepper

Method

1. Boil the yuca until fully tender, then mill or mash into a smooth, workable dough.
2. For the filling, sauté the peppers, tomato, onion and garlic in the oil for 2 minutes, add the beef, tomato sauce, salt and pepper, and simmer on low for 10 minutes.
3. Take a portion of yuca dough, flatten in the palm, place a spoonful of filling in the centre, and wrap the dough around it into a torpedo shape, sealing the edges well.
4. Deep fry until golden.

Notes

No strong Panama-specific origin story survives checking; the dish is also well documented on the Colombian Caribbean coast, and every Panamanian source consulted calls it simply typical and popular, with no history attached.

What a modern chef changes

A sous vide filling, and a smoother dough

Rung 02

Method

1. Cook the beef filling under sous vide at a controlled temperature until fully tender before the final sauté, giving an evenly cooked, consistent filling from carimañola to carimañola rather than the variable result a quick pan-simmer gives at scale.
2. Pass the boiled yuca through a high power blender before shaping, working in only as much of the cooking water as needed for a smooth, pipeable dough, which shapes far more evenly by hand or piping bag than a coarser mash does.
3. Apply Rung 2's two-temperature fry exactly as for patacones, since carimañolas suffer from the same greasy-outside, underdone-inside failure mode when fried at one compromise heat.