The Caribbean · Volume 12, The Sofrito, the Libreta and the Ninety Miles to Miami
Bacán
Baracoa, Guantánamo
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 106 sources in the brief
Bacán is Baracoa's tamal, and it has no corn in it. Green plantain or green banana is grated raw, mixed with pork or crab cooked in a sauce of coconut milk, wrapped in banana leaf and boiled. The Guantánamo provincial paper Venceremos, quoting the 2013 book Baracoa: Más allá de La Farola, has the parcels tied with thin strips of yagua, the leaf sheath of the royal palm, and boiled like a corn tamal. The same book gives the bacán perdido, the mass cooked loose in a caldero with banana leaves and live embers laid on the lid, and the guanimo, the same thing with no meat, tied at both ends.
The recipe follows the island clock, as Silvia Mayra Gómez Fariñas gave it in Cubadebate in 2018: a Havana kitchen's bacán, with bijol and a pressure cooker allowed. The fruit is the one real argument. The Baracoa sources grate guineo or plátano fruta, the eating banana picked green; Gómez Fariñas grates green plantain, and when she gave the pot version in 2026 she swapped the book's guineo for plátano burro. Both are given. "They say a bacán must never lack heat," she writes, and her own version leaves the hot pepper out.
As tradition built it
Serves 4.
Ingredients
- 12 green plantains, or green bananas as Baracoa uses them
- 1 lime
- 3 tbsp lard
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1 sweet pepper, ají pimiento, chopped
- 6 garlic cloves, crushed
- ¼ tsp oregano or culantro
- 1½ cups pork, diced, or smoked meat or shellfish
- ½ cup tomato purée
- ¼ tsp bijol or annatto
- 1 cup coconut milk
- to taste black pepper
- to taste salt
- as needed banana leaves, washed, for wrapping
Method
- Peel, wash and grate the green plantains into a bowl, and squeeze the lime over them so they do not darken.
- Make a sofrito in a caldero: the lard, then the onion, the sweet pepper, the garlic, the oregano or culantro and a little salt.
- Add the pork and cook it through.
- Add the tomato purée, the bijol, black pepper and the coconut milk, and cook until the sauce thickens.
- Mix the sauce into the grated plantain.
- Lay out the banana leaves, spoon the mixture on, fold each into a parcel and tie it.
- Lower the parcels into a pot of hot water and boil them 45 minutes, or 30 minutes in a pressure cooker.
Notes
The crab bacán takes an enchilado de cangrejo as its filling: land crab boiled, its meat and the fat from the shell fried with hot pepper and spices, coconut milk optional. Venceremos gives it without quantities.
What a modern chef changes
The sofrito built in order, the crab used whole, and the cazuela finished under coals
Rung 01
Method
- Build the sofrito in its order, onion first until soft, then pepper and garlic, then the tomato reduced before the coconut milk goes in. Rung 01: everything in at once gives a thin sauce, and the plantain carries only what the sauce brings.
- Grate green banana where you can find it. It is what Baracoa uses, and Caribbean greengrocers in Britain sell both; plantain gives a firmer, starchier bacán.
- For the crab version, use a brown crab and its brown meat. The Baracoa enchilado fries the meat in the fat from the shell, and a brown crab's brown meat does that job.
- Make the bacán perdido in a kamado. A heavy pot set in the Big Green Egg, banana leaf over the mass and the lid closed, is the caldero with embers on the lid: heat from above and below, as Venceremos describes it.