The Food in Argentina

One of my readers asked for some more information about the food in Argentina. I have included some comments in other posts and if you want to see those, hit the label "food" at the bottom of this post and it will call up all posts with that label. As I reviewed them I realized I had not been extremely descriptive, so I will give a capsule here and try to include more info about food as I go along from this point. In a nutshell, Argentine food is heavy on meat, especially beef, but also chicken, pork and lamb, as well as venison here in Bariloche, in the mountains. (I had some venison stuffed ravioli last week in a little Italian restaurant where the owner's horse was tied up outside. I wanted to ask him if he rode the horse up into the hills to shoot the deer, but it was beyond my Spanish language skills! Anyway, the venison in such small chopped up quantity in each ravioli and covered with tomato sauce, was not really very unique, but still, very tasty.) Most of the food is very tasty!

Argentines do lousy breakfasts. They are heavy on coffee or tea and medialunas (crescent pastries) or toast. You can get yogurt or fruit or cereal, but eggs and bacon are extremely difficult to find in a restaurant (at least for breakfast, more about that later.) Also, OJ in restaurants is extremely expensive! Muy carro! The pastries are very good, and the coffee is excellent. I have yet to really have a bad cup of coffee. They do their own form of espresso, called cafe chico, or mediano, or grande (all indicate the size) and they also do cordito, capucino, americano, submarino (which is coffee with a spoonful of chocolate to stir into), and other varieties I cannot remember. (I have not seen a Starbucks here yet, though!) They don't need one, as their coffee is great.

They do a variety of things for lunch. Some eat a large meal, some eat small. They have sandwiches that look terrible: extremely thin slices of white bread in triple and quadruple layers with micro-thin slices of ham or ham crudo (sort of like prosciutto, but not really), and cheese. They are not very tasty, I had one on the bus. They do other ham and cheese sandwiches on pan de francais and other sorts of bread as well. They also do lomo sandwiches, which are either a beef or chicken tenderloin. If you get these completo they come with tomato, lettuce, ham or bacon, a fried egg, cheese, and mayonnaise. (Ketchup you have to ask for and they seem to ration it. I have never received more than 2 -3 small packets at a time when I have asked for it. Mayonnaise, however, they seem to love and I have seen them dip papas fritas, french fries, in it.) Lomo sandwiches, as you can tell, are usually HUGE and delicious. I have yet to be disappointed in one and have learned that if I order it, it will be a large meal for me. Most of their portions are really big.

For lunch or dinner, the entree is usually some sort of beef, (of course their steaks are delicious) or chicken. A common form of preparation, beyond just grilling, is milanese, which is a breaded and fried tenderloin hammered very thin. This also can come with a variety of sauces. Along with the entree they rely very heavily on potatoes, or pasta, and to some extent rice. In addition to papas fritas (french fries) they do papas puree (mashed potatoes) and other forms of potatoes that I have not tried. They also do mashed calabazzas squash which is very good. They do salads, too, but they are pretty basic, lettuce, tomato, onion for the most part with oil and vinegar to put on it. They do not have the myriad variety of dressings as the US.

Besides the original Spanish immigrants, the next largest group was Italian, and that is evident in their prolific use of pasta. Almost every restaurant has some sort of pasta dishes on the menu, usually spaghetti, ravioli, gnocchi, lasagna, and cannelloni. However, their cannelloni is usually made with a crepe more than an actual pasta noodle. They do a variety of sauces, tomato, cream, 4 cheeses, with or without meat. Sometimes the meat is chunks of roast beef, not hamburger. (Oh, you can also get hamburgers and hot dogs, but my thought is "why?").

This has become a rather long post, so I will end it for now and later in the week tell you about the pride of their menu, Asado and Parilla, which are Argentine barbecue, but nothing at all like US barbecue. I will also share a little about their postres, desserts, which I have not partaken of very much, as well as the chocolate in Bariloche! (I am still taste-testing that!)

The pictures above are of my favorite lunch cafe/bar in Buenos Aires, and you can see a bit of the food served. Then the bar in San Telmo (a barrio in Buenos Aires) where I had my first HUGE chicken lomo sandwich. Finally, the Italian Restaurant in Bariloche with the horse out front where I had my venison stuffed ravioli.