Chile
2,700 miles of Pacific seafood, Andean corn and a loaded avocado hot dog — plus pisco sour and rediscovered Carménère.
Chile is a 2,700-mile ribbon of coast, so seafood is never far — razor clams baked with parmesan, mussels and mote, ceviche in the dry north — but the country's comfort food is built on corn and beef. Bite into an empanada de pino and mind the olive inside its minced-beef, onion, raisin and egg filling; dig into pastel de choclo, a sweet-savoury corn casserole baked over the same mixture, and you've tasted the everyday Chilean table.
Down south in Chiloé they cook curanto in a pit of hot stones, layering shellfish, meat and potato breads under leaves. In the cities the quick fix is the completo, a hot dog buried under mashed avocado, tomato and mayonnaise. And everywhere there's wine and pisco: a tart pisco sour to start, then a glass of Carménère, the lost Bordeaux grape that turned up thriving here in 1994 and became the national red.
- Empanada de pino (beef
- onion
- egg & olive pastry)
- Pastel de choclo (corn-topped meat pie)
- Cazuela (meat & vegetable stew)
- Curanto (pit-cooked seafood & meat)
- Completo (loaded hot dog)
- Machas a la parmesana (razor clams & parmesan)
- Pisco sour
