Guatemala30

Guatemalan chiles rellenos are roasted, peeled bell peppers stuffed with a picadillo of ground beef or pork and diced vegetables, then dipped in a whipped egg batter, fried golden, and served in a light tomato sauce. Unlike the Mexican version, they use no cheese and no chili-walnut sauce. Ingredients The pepper comes first, and it matters which one. Guatemalan cooks reach for the sweet bell pepper, the chile pimiento, not the dark poblano you would use across the border in Mexico. Everything else builds the picadillo around it. For the…

Tamales colorados are Guatemala’s red tamal: soft corn masa sauced with a recado of tomato, tomatillo, guaque and pasa chiles, achiote, and toasted pepitoria and sesame, wrapped around pork or chicken with an olive and a strip of roasted red pepper, then steamed in banana leaf. What Makes a Tamal Colorado the Guatemalan Saturday Tamal In Guatemala, Saturday is tamale day. A small red lantern hung outside a tienda signals that the tamales colorados are ready that evening. This is not a special-occasion food in the way an outsider might…

Pollo en crema is a Central American dish of bone-in chicken in a cultured-cream sauce built on tomatillo or tomato, with guisquil, carrot, and potato. The Guatemalan version is vegetable-forward, mildly seasoned, and often finished with loroco. It is everyday food — the kind of Sunday pot that feeds the whole table — and it won the 2011 AGEXPORT competition for most representative Guatemalan dish in the loroco variant. Every July, Chimaltenango hosts a festival celebrating it. That is not a country hedging about its cuisine. Ingredients The sauce is…

Short answer: Hilachas is a Guatemalan home stew of beef shredded into fine threads and simmered in a tomato-and-tomatillo recado built on guajillo chiles, cinnamon, and cloves, with potato, carrot, and green beans cooked in. The name means rags or threads, for the way long-simmered flank steak pulls apart into strands. It is a ladino dish — everyday comedor food, not Maya heritage — and its signature is a double process: you cook the beef until it shreds, then separately build and fry a smooth recado before combining them. That…

Short answer: Jocón is one of Guatemala's four great Maya recados: chicken simmered in a bright green sauce of tomatillos, scallions, cilantro, epazote, and green chiles, with body from toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds ground fine and a little torn tortilla. The name comes from the K'iche' word jok'om, meaning mashed or ground — a direct reference to that seed-grinding step at the heart of the technique. It is a dish of the western highlands, declared national Intangible Cultural Heritage of Guatemala in 2007, and it is the stew that…