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The Southern Cone · Volume 26, Coast, Valley and the Mapuche and German South

Pastel de choclo

Central Valley, campesino origin

Pastel de choclo, a beef and chicken pie under a sweet corn crust: a rustic earthenware dish showing a deeply browned, blistered golden corn topping with distinct caramelised patches, a small breach at the edge revealing a dark savoury filling of minced meat.

Illustration

Time
1 hour 50

Central valley rural food, apparently absent from that period's own cookbooks, which served an urban elite, despite being widespread among campesinos, and only moving into Santiago from around 1900 as rural migration into the city grew.

As tradition built it

About 1 hour 50 minutes in total: pastelera 35 minutes, pino 10 to 15 minutes, baking 45 to 60 minutes.

Ingredients

  • 10 cups (or 4 x 454g bags frozen corn) fresh corn kernels, blended to a purée, for the pastelera
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • to taste salt
  • 1 to 2 tsp, to taste a little sugar
  • 1kg, diced onion, sautéed until translucent, for the pino
  • 2 tsp ají de color
  • 2 tsp oregano
  • 1 tsp cumin
  • to taste pepper
  • 500g minced beef
  • 6, cooked and deboned chicken pieces
  • 10 to 12 olives
  • 2, quartered boiled egg

Method

  1. Blend fresh corn kernels to a purée and cook with milk, salt and a little sugar for around 35 minutes, stirring constantly until thick and spreadable, to make the pastelera topping.
  2. Sauté the onion until translucent, then add ají de color, oregano, cumin, pepper and minced beef, cooking 10 to 15 minutes to make the pino.
  3. Assemble the pino with chicken pieces, olives and boiled egg, then top with the pastelera.
  4. Bake 45 to 60 minutes at 200°C until bubbling and browned.

What a modern chef changes

A silkier pastelera, and chicken confit sous vide

Method

  1. Blend the corn in a high-power blender, then pass it through a chinois, for a genuinely silkier pastelera with none of the fibrous corn skin a home blender alone leaves behind.
  2. Confit the chicken sous vide before it goes into the pino, so it stays properly moist through the second, longer bake rather than drying out under the topping.
  3. Finish the top under the Big Green Egg's direct heat, or with a kitchen torch, for real caramelisation rather than the pale, merely-set top a domestic oven tends to give.
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