All diary
Argentinian diary products are all excellent. They taste quite different from American products, most likely because the cows have a different feed. Some day – I can only hope – they’ll start importing these products to the US and they’ll take it by storm.
I’m not a milk drinker, so I can’t comment on the milk – but butter and cream just taste better.
Mayo
Yep, even mayo tastes better. It might be the eggs (not an egg eater, didn’t try them) but most likely it’s the oil they use: sunflower seed oil. I’m going to have to check at stores that carry Argentine products if they sell Argentine mayo as well.
French Fries
I don’t exactly know why, but Argentine french fries are all yummy. They are usually on the thin side – a little bit fatter than your average McDonald fry – and non-coated. But I think the secret is, once again, the oil on which they are fried. On some cases it may be sunflower seed oil or grapeseed oil, but in others it’s just a comercial mixture.
Strawberries
They were in season when we first got there, and OH MY GOD – the little, totally ripe strawberries where unbelievable. It reminded me of why, as a kid, strawberries and cream was my favorite dessert to order at restaurants.
Beef
Need I say more?
Rotisserie Chicken
As a kid I LOVED pollo al spiedo or rotisserie chicken. There was a deli kitty corner to our house and its amazing aroma teased me every time I’d go by. But it was a special treat which we could only have once in a while. No wonder, even now a rotisserie chicken costs U$6, pretty much the same as in the US and substantially more than beef. Rotisserie chickens are no longer widely available in Argentina, they’ve been supplanted by grilled chicken, but we had it a couple of times in Salta. And OH MY GOD, it was soooooooooooo good. Surely the marinades must be a reason, if I could only find those recipes.
Medialunas
Argentina’s croissants can be great – but they not always are. At the hands of the right bakery they can be heavenly, though.
Masas Finas
These bite-size pastries often featuring dulce de leche are also a wonderful treat. They are expensive – often costing U$7-11 a kilo (depending of the bakery).
Milhoja
This typical Argentine treat consists of multiple layers of very thin phillo-like dough covered with dulce de leche. Again, it’s a matter of which bakery makes it, but at the hands of the right bakery it can be delicious. I had to bring a kilo of milhoja to my sister back from Argentina.
Imperial
This is another typical Argentine tea-time treat. It’s a rectangular cake of hard merengue and cream. Yummy.
Alfajores
They deserve a whole entry of their own. Stay tuned.
Bocaditos bonafide and cabsha
Yummy dulce de leche is covered by a thin layer of chocolate. I’m eating one as I write this. It’s heaven.
Dulce de leche
Of course
Ice Cream
Argentine ice cream rocks. It’s lighter than American ice cream and with more intense flavors. Apparently this is because it has less air and less cream but I don’t really know. And of course, it’s made with Argentine milk which makes all the difference. It’s relatively expensive for Argentinians – one reason why ice cream was such a treat when I was a kid – with a kilo costing between $5-7 depending where you buy it.
Flavors are also significantly different from those available here. There is strawberry (choice of water or creme based), chocolate and vanilla, of course, but much better are dulce de leche granizado (dulce de leche with shaved dark chocolate), crema americana, sambayón, tramontana, mantecol and others. We ate ice cream at least once every day and I already miss it!
Paso de los Toros Pomelo Light
This is a diet grapefruit soda manufactured by Pepsico which is actually delicious. The regular version is quite good, but the light version, which is less sweet, is even better. If you like grapefruit soda, you’d go crazy over it. Alas, it’s not available in the US. Which is difficult to understand as it’s just sooooooooooooooooo good. Please, someone at Pepsi, bring it to the US!
Now, as for things that are not good in Argentina:
Cookies
They suck, they are dry and lack flavor.
Cereal
Just try to find cereal without sugar. I dare you. Try (OK, maybe a health food store, but not at the supermarket).
Variety
In Buenos Aires you can find a number of ethnic restaurants, but forget about having non-Argentinian food (other than Chinese or Spanish) almost anywhere else.
Chocolate
Vastly inferior to American or European chocolate.
Author: marga (Page 87 of 112)
OK, does anyone have any? 🙂 If so, do e-mail (or comment here).
According to the SL Times, Chili’s opened at the Bayfair mall a week ago, and Chevy’s is moving its location to inside the mall.
There is finally some progress in the opening of Cafe Sorriso at the old Latte Da site on the corner of Juana and Washington. Soon after Latte Da closed – after the owner increased the rent considerably – the sign for Cafe Sorriso appeared, but nothing more happened for months. A couple of days ago the exterior was finally painted, a very nice shade of yellow-orange, I might add. Hopefully it means they’re getting ready to open.
The same cannot be said about the Kolbeh restaurant which took the space of Casa Maria #2. The sign is still there but nothing else has happened, I daresay nothing will.
Finally, rumor has it that Angelina’s changed ownership a few months ago, and that the new owner has no experience running a restaurant of any kind. I hear his people skills are poor, to say the least, and a waitress and two delivery drivers have quit in the last couple of weeks. The kitchen stuff remains, but I hear they are not happy.
Other than asado, empanadas are probaby Argentina’s most traditional food. They are also one of its most popular. They are widely available at restaurants, cafes, bakeries, pizzerias and, of course, empanada shops. I’ve always held that empanadas are the perfect food. They are portable, you can eat them anywhere (often with little mess), some are good hot or cold, eat one and it’s a snack, eat a few and you have a whole meal. Mike seems to have adopted this philosophy as he pretty much had an empanada or two (or three or four) every day we were in Argentina. Of course, he swore that mine are better than anything he tried, but he’s a smart man.
As far as I can tell there are three basic types of empanadas: fritas, al horno and souffle. Baked empanadas are most common and most popular, they are lower in fat, easier to make (deep friers are still a novelty in Argentina) and they can be eaten at room temperature or reheated without loss in quality. Fried empanadas are considered more traditional, and when we’ve had them we’ve remarked at how good they are. Still, I don’t think they are probably worth the extra calories. Souffle empanadas are a variant of fried empanadas, according to my quick research on the web they are made by taking the empanadas out of a cold refrigerator and quickly introducing them into very hot oil. The results are fluffier empanada with a drier dough. We only had them the last two days we were in Argentina, at an empanada place in La Plata called El Ladrillo (where my parents used to buy them decades ago) and they were amazingly good. Yep, even better than mine.
As for fillings, the standard ones are beef, chicken, ham and cheese and humita (corn). Also popular are Roquefort cheese (they must mix it with another cheese, I’d like to find out which), Napolitanas (with tomato, ham and cheese), onion and spinach. In some places we tried empanadas
I’ve concluded that Argentine pizza is an acquired taste. Not one difficult to acquire, mind you, but I have to admit that we didn’t enjoy that first bite of a pizza in Argentina nearly as much as we did subsequent ones. By the end of the trip, I, at least, greatly preferred it to American pizza (with the exception of Zachary’s, of course).
Argentine pizza tends to have a bready thin-to-medium crust which tastes quite good on its own. It’s covered by a extremely thin layer of tomato sauce, so thin that sometimes I wondered if it had any sauce at all, and then by a ton of mozarella cheese and whatever other topping you’ve chosen (the choices are usually much fewer than in the US, ham being the most common one). Each slice then is decorated by a green olive and, sometimes, by a slice of preserved red pepper. Oregano is sprinkled on the pizza before baking. Most often pizza is baked in a pan, though some places serve pizza a la piedra, or pizza baked on a stone. I can’t say that I’ve noticed a significant difference between the two.
Argentine mozarella cheese, like all diary products, tastes different from American mozarella and I think that might be the reason why Argentine pizza is tastier. In general, diary products in Argentina are just good (all that Pampa grass is good for something). Though of course, having a pizza that just oozes cheese everywhere doesn’t hurt – your average Argentine pizza probably has at least 3 times as much cheese as your average American pizza.
What was perhaps most amazing to me is that Argentine pizzas were served just about everywhere, and they were just as good whether served at a pizzeria, a regular restaurant, a cafe or made at home from a pre-pizza (a la Boboli). Indeed, even the frozen pizzas were much tastiers than the ones here. Pizza is also quite cheap, we generally paid between U$2-3 for a “large”pizza, which was probably 8” in diameter but was large enough for the 4 of us (of course, 2 of us are under the age of 4).
The *only* place where we had a pizza we didn’t like was a restaurant in Mar del Plata (forgot the name) where they show a movie with your lunch. I guess that’s enough to get the tourists in, and they don’t have to bother to make even passable pizza. Needless to say we only went once.
Even the pizza at the tenedores libres, or buffets, was quite good.
Tonight we’re babysitting and our usual ritual on babysitting nights is to order pizza – and truth be told, I wish I could have an Argentinian pizza rather than an American one.
I haven’t updated this blog for the last month and half or so ’cause I’ve been visiting my home country of Argentina. Though Argentinian food offers little variety it can be quite good and satisfying. Indeed both Mike and I were surprised that by the end of our trip we weren’t craving for any particular food from back home (California) and would have been quite happy to eat another empanada, milanesa or steak.
Rather than writing a whole posting about eating in Argentina, which feels too daunting now, I thought I’d write whatever comes to mind in individual postings. Hope you enjoy it.
A couple of days ago Mike had dinner with a friend at Le Charm in San Francisco, at my suggestion (I saw good things about it posted online). He didn’t come home happy. The overall meal wasn’t bad. As an appetizer he had the House Made Boudin Noir Sausage with Toasted Walnuts, apples and Currants ($8). The sausage was not cased and had a funny texture (but perhaps that’s the case for blood sausages) but it was very tasty and he gave it a thumbs up. His friend had the Hot Goat Cheese and Smoked Salmon Terrine ($8) and she seemed to like it, ate it all without making any comments. As a main dish, she had the Confit of Wild Boar Shoulder with Spa
I knew that all the time I wasted in craigslist had to be good for something. Today I found out that the green part of green onions make a good substitute for chives. Apparently many restaurants use them as a matter of course (and still call them chives). I never have chives around, but often I have green onions so this will work great for me.
I came across this cheese at PW Supermarket and gave it a try. It was wonderful. Though it’s only double cream, it is the creamiest cheese I’ve ever tasted, it’s texture was pure silkness and every bite (on sourdough baguette) seemed like a luxury. I also loved the taste, milder and less bitter than brie. It was quite a hit with my omnivorous 10-month old too.
Our Safeway (the one on Washington Ave. in downtown San Leandro) got yuppisized last summer, and the process seems to continue. Today I found that they’re selling Bhutanese Red Rice, forbidden rice and another gourmet rice which until recently I had to go to Berkeley to find. They had some cool multi-colored couscous, though no Israeli couscous yet. And they are expanding their line of organic products, they have organic ice cream now (haven’t tried it yet). Stil, I couldn’t find any Jerusalem artichokes there either.
I’ve been in San Leandro for almost 6 years now, and yet I just discovered PW Market in Castro Valley. I’ve received their flyers all along, but as they weren’t local to me I always just tossed them in the recycle bin. Then my friend Regina mentioned she was going to go there to get some pastries for our tea last Sunday and she took me along.
PW could be described as a quasi-upscale supermarket. Most of the products it carries are those that you can find at most supermarkets, but it does have great meat and deli departments. Granted, we’re only a couple of days from Thanksgiving but when we visited they had goose, pheasant and rabbit available in addition to turkeys and chickens. Their meat department features prime-grade beef (something which is hard to find at retail stores) at very reasonable prices. Their lamb offerings, however, were poorer. The two racks of lamb I saw looked sad and I couldn’t see any lamb shanks. They did seem to have a large variety of seafood, however.
We were quite impressed by their cheese section, it didn’t feature many local favorites like Whole Food does, but there was a wide variety and the one French brie we got was delicious.
Their deli offered plenty of pasta-style salads, and their bakery section though small is very nice. We got a couple of lemon bars, a little mocha cheesecake, some scones and an apple bread pudding and they were all delicious.
On the minus side, they didn’t seem to carry much in the exotic ingredient category. I couldn’t find either Jerusalem artichokes or Israeli couscous there.
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