Vegan Locro de Papa

A longer and more detailed description

Have you ever wanted to make mashed potato soup? Because today, we’re basically making mashed potato soup. And I’m good with that.

Start by doing the same thing we do every week, Pinkie - heating oil and tossing onions and garlic into it. There may come a day when we don’t do this thing, but it is not this day, and to be honest, I don’t really want that day to come. Once the onions and garlic are cooked, add in potatoes and spices. Give everything a nice mixy mix, then drown it all in broth. Set the broth to boil and wander off, leaving it unattended so it can boil over and make a big mess.

We really are running the full gamut of what taters are, aren’t we, precious? We’re boiling them, then mashing them, and I guess a soup is a kind of stew?

Once the potatoes are soft, remove your soup from the heat and mash the potatoes (cooking pro-tip: don’t stick your hand in boiling soup!). The potatoes should ideally be lumpy, but not too lumpy, unless you hate lumps, in which case, you do you, weirdo.

Add your milk and cheese and heat the soup back up for a few more minutes on low heat. Once it’s heated and thickened to your liking, remove it from the heat and serve with chopped cilantro, avocado, hot sauce, and more cheese. Buen provecho and allin mikuna!

Substitutions and Suggestions

For the potatoes: Potatoes in the Netherlands come with descriptions of how mashable they are. You want the mashable potatoes.
For the cheese: This should ideally be a mozzarella-esque cheese. If you want to make the soup a bit healthier, you can top the soup with peanuts instead of cheese.
For the hot sauce: Traditionally, this would be topped with aji sauce; however, I, being in Europe, don’t have access to this or indeed any tasty hot sauces. I used a chipotle sauce I found, which was also quite lovely. You also, of course, don’t have to add this, but then, what’s even the point anymore?

What I changed to make it vegan

Milk and cheese are famously non-vegan. So I made them vegan! 10 points for me!

What to listen to while you cook this

It’s older, but I really enjoyed listening to Fresia Saveedra and just bopping around my kitchen while waiting for potatoes to cook. I highly recommend giving her a listen.

A bit of context for this dish

If I told you there was such a thing as a land of soup, and that we are making a soup from the land of soup, would you believe me?

The soup we made today is a locro, but it is not the only locro. Locro is the name for an entire family of Andean soups, generally made with a starchy base, but with that base varying depending on who is making it and the time of year in which it’s being made. There are hundreds of locros. And - perhaps expectedly, perhaps not - the variety and shape of these locros is as varied as the people of the Andes themselves.

The story of the locro is, in many ways, the story of Ecuador itself. These soups likely date back to the arrival of people into what is now Ecuador, at least 10000 years ago. While we don’t have direct archaeological evidence for ancient Andean peoples making modern locros, it isn’t hard to imagine these ancient peoples chucking potatoes or plantains into soup to see what happens. It’s basically what I do every day in my kitchen.

What makes locro interesting beyond its deliciousness is the amalgamation of ingredients that become part of it. Bases like hominy are common in locros, but are not native to the Andes. Instead, they reflect the complexity of prehistoric American life. Ecuador lay at the heart of pan-American trade routes, with objects made by the El Inga culture in 8000 BCE being found as far north as the Clovis sites in New Mexico. These trade routes, like many trade routes, brought new foodstuffs from North and Mesoamerica south, while goods and food from the South made its way north.

A Jama-Coaque artefact from 300BCE, and I love its adorable face so much

Much as food made its way into the Ecuadorean Andes from the north, culinary habits made their way throughout the Andes, becoming part of the Andean culinary tradition rather than the tradition of any one people. Locros exist throughout the Andes, with their ingredients shifting depending on what was available locally, but nonetheless representing an underlying unity. No matter the differences between the various peoples of the Andes, locros are a commonality, spanning history, geography, and language to be a fundamental part of the lives of the people of the Andes.

This tradition continued even in the face of conquest. The Incas who conquered the Cosangua-Píllaro, Capulí and Piartal-Tuza adopted locros, and when the Spanish conquered the Inca, the locro took on a Spanish character as well. Food persists, and culinary traditions persist, even in the face of genocide and conquest.

While my kitchen in Amsterdam is a far cry from the mountains of South America, there is still a joy in making a locro. In its own, quiet way, it feels like a persisting of that narrative and an assurance that, no matter what else is true, the food will survive. It’s a narrative passed down through the generations, and I, through making it, continue that story.

And now, so too do you. :)