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 and 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. This chapter states that gap rather than inventing a lineage.

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.