Haute cuisine enters the jungle: ‘The Spanish and French have the technique, we have the pantry’

At 60 years of age, Lidia Rodríguez still keeps the recipe for fariña practically intact, just as her ancestors made it. To obtain a kilo of this flour, it takes almost two years of work, from planting the yuca — the root of the cassava plant — to packaging it. The tuber is cleaned, fermented, kneaded, sifted and passed through the cassava flour. “Knead it like this,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “There are no shortcuts.”

Every eight days, this woman travels from the community of La Chorrera to Leticia, the capital of the Colombian region of Amazonas, to try to sell her bags of fariña, mojojoy (beetle larva) and casabe. She admits that, sometimes, she brings the fariña back.

“They want to buy it from me for 10,000 pesos (about $2 per kilo),” she says, annoyed. “The people of Bogotá seem to be from a different country than those of us who come from the jungle. If it weren’t for us, Colombians wouldn’t know even half of the fruits of their own country.”

When she’s speaking about city folks, she’s referring to the 16 haute cuisine chefs who are gathered at the Mini-Mal restaurant in the capital, to create sophisticated and delicious dishes with Rodríguez’s fariña, Marianela Cuiri’s mambe, or Alonso’s uva camarona. The culinary revolution on the continent has a lot to do with returning to Indigenous roots and getting into the jungle. Rodríguez dreams that it will also end up sneaking into the neighborhood kitchens and onto more economical menus.

Corn empanadas with tucupí ham, puff pastries filled with mambe custard, smoked mushroom soup and wild tomatoes, yuca tamales with copoazu ice cream… tasting the jungle is like discovering new colors. Sometimes, there’s nothing to compare them with.

In the kitchen at Afluente, the ecosystem is a fusion of Colombia and Tanzania. Jeferson García, the owner of the establishment and head chef, also wanted to honor his grandmother and great-grandmother. After 13 years living abroad in Denmark, Chile and Thailand, he returned to Colombia feeling like a tourist. “I decided to rediscover [the country] on foot. Along the way, I found new ingredients: moorland chili, coralito, vinagrillo, morón... that’s what my grandmother, Mercedes, used to eat. And now, I put it in my dishes with the techniques I’ve learned,” this young man says with a smile. He used to cook at the iconic Central restaurant, in Lima, Peru.

“We’re learning to work with our own products. And the producers who make them, they count as well. Sometimes, we pay them up to three times more than what they ask. It’s sad that there are people who haggle with them,” he laments. García supplies a significant part of his pantry with crops from the fall harvest in the jungle. This involves going into the Amazon after heavy rains, to collect the fruits that have fallen “so that the animals in the area don’t eat them.” The greatest satisfaction for him is the approval of Mercedes: “It’s different, but she says she likes it.”

Between camu camu ice creams and macambo desserts, there’s a stand that’s busier than all the others. Atop some small bijao leaves are mixtures of beaten egg with turmeric, filled with wild mushrooms and chili. This is served by Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, by hand. He’s one of the great innovators of the urban cuisine that looks towards the jungle for inspiration and ingredients. He says he prepares this nina juane — very similar to Japanese chawanmushi — because it preserves the unique flavour of the Amazon. “Haute cuisine is changing. But you have to do things not just because they’re trendy or attractive or because they’re new, but because there’s a value behind all of this,” says the owner of the gourmet restaurants Malabar and Ámaz, both located in Lima.

The Peruvian admits that he has always dreamed of “integrating not only the ingredients, but also the Amazonian culture” into the main capitals of Latin America. “And [I want these ingredients] to be on everyone’s table; that’s the challenge, but the restaurants are the spearhead. What I’ve seen in Bogotá is incredible, because there’s tremendous integration, much more than in Lima. Bogotá is a great trailblazer in this movement.” El Chato, Mesa Franca, Humo Negro, Salvo Patria, Afluente... the offer of restaurants with this approach is increasingly common. “The Spanish and the French have the technique, but we have the pantry,” says the Barranquilla-based chef Andrews Arrieta.

Minimal, the mythical corner of Bogotá that pays homage to products from the Pacific and the Amazon, was decked out for the Amazon Basket event, held in mid-August. This meeting, organized by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), brought the flavors of the Amazonian foothills, the deep Amazonia, and the Orinoquía to the Chapinero neighborhood in Bogotá.

For Jose Luis Gómez, director of WCS for the Andes-Amazon-Orinoquía region, cooking is one of the many economic alternatives in the Amazon. “The competition is mining and illegal deforestation. It’s a huge challenge to make the offer to these producers attractive, when compared to illicit economies,” he explains. “But over the last decade, it has begun to be a driving force.”

The other challenge, he says, is to prevent the demand from becoming massive and avoid producing monocultures of a single food. “The key is to reach fair pricing agreements and work with the communities, to establish a different kind of relationship. We have to achieve that in some way — and we can vote with our wallets. The role of the consumer is very important.”

With the money that the seven women producers of the Doña Cuiru cooperative have saved, they “buy the necessities for the house” and pay for solar panels so they can have some electricity. “But we almost always spend money paying for transportation from the community to the highway,” the women note. In this area of the Amazon, public infrastructure is conspicuously absent. Dozens of communities — including the one where the cooperative is based — lack drinking water, electricity, roads, or highways.

“The state should subsidize these initiatives, but normally, public investment is concentrated where there are more people,” Gómez laments. “The peripheral territories don’t receive much investment, but we hope that this will change. A healthy economy allows customs and traditions to be preserved… everything that the illicit economy is destroying.”

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