Plato paceño

Name: Plato paceño
Total time: 45 min
Yield: Serves 8
Cuisine: Bolivia, the Altiplano and the Valleys
Ingredients: as needed chala (corn husks); to cover boiling water; 8 tender corn cobs (choclos), husked; 1kg green broad beans, shelled; 8 potatoes, in their skins; 60ml oil, or enough to fry the cheese; 4 fresh quesillos, or queso paceño; 240ml llajwa

La Paz, Bolivia

Plato paceño, fried beef, fried cheese, corn, potato and habas: a rustic plate with four distinct mounds, a browned piece of fried beef, a golden slab of fried cheese, a large pale kernel of boiled choclo still on its cob.

Illustration

Time: 45 minutes

by La Paz, Bolivia

Plato paceño and chairo are both traced by Bolivian sources to the 1781 siege of La Paz, led by Túpac Katari and Bartolina Sisa, which lasted over three months. As food ran short inside the city, the mayor, Sebastián Segurola, is said to have ordered nearby hacienda owners to bring in whatever provisions they had, and the improvised combination that resulted, choclo, habas, potato, cheese, is presented as plato paceño's origin. The addition of beef, and the later shift from sheep's or llama cheese to cow's cheese, is dated to the 19th century, and at least one Bolivian source flags this specific detail as "not fully accepted," a useful reminder that even a story this settled in popular memory carries a part that local historians themselves treat as unresolved. Chairo's own popularisation in the city is tied by sources to the same siege, framed as a fusion of Aymara and Spanish cooking that became emblematic over the following two centuries. An alternative, thinner theory derives plato paceño instead from apthapi, the communal shared-food spread; it could not be verified further and is not asserted.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Plato paceño

Serves 8. About 45 minutes in the pot.

Ingredients

as needed chala (corn husks)
to cover boiling water
8 tender corn cobs (choclos), husked
1kg green broad beans, shelled
8 potatoes, in their skins
60ml oil, or enough to fry the cheese
4 fresh quesillos, or queso paceño
240ml llajwa

Method

Line the bottom of a pot with plenty of corn husks and pour over boiling water to cover them.
Keep the heat high. When the water boils, put in the choclos, lay more husks on top, and set the broad beans on them. Boil about 25 minutes.
Put the washed potatoes in, cover again with husks, and boil 20 minutes more, until done.
Heat the oil in a frying pan over a high heat and fry the quesillos, halved into two rounds, or slices of queso paceño.
Serve each plate with a choclo, broad beans, a potato and half a fried quesillo, with llajwa.

Notes

The recipe is Cristina Olmos's, of Calendario Sabores de Bolivia, published on Alasita day in 2016. Neither her recipe nor recetas.com.bo has fried beef. Recetas.com.bo cooks each part in its own pot and gives the llajwa: locoto, tomato, wacataya, quirquiña and parsley ground together with the tomato's juice and a little salt.

What a modern chef changes

Confit beef, concentrated cheese, charred veg

Method

Confit the beef in the sous vide bath rather than pan-frying it straight.
Finish it hard and fast under the Big Green Egg's direct heat for the same browned crust the traditional fry gives, with none of the toughness a hot pan alone risks on a leaner cut.
Dehydrate a portion of the cheese briefly before frying, concentrating it so the fry produces a firmer, more deeply savoury crust around a still-soft centre.
Serve the habas and choclo lightly charred over direct heat rather than plain-boiled, a real but modest departure from tradition, stated honestly as a change rather than presented as invisible.

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