Bolivian Trancapecho

If you’d asked me before this month what I knew about Bolivia, I’d have told you “It’s where Butch and Sundance died.” Bolivia is one of the least-visited countries in South America according to the World Tourism Organization, or “vivid, strange, and yet to be ruined by tourists” according to a Telegraph writer earlier this year.

Despite being one of the biggest cities in the country, Cochabamba does not appear to be one of the preferred destinations of the few tourists who do visit the country–it isn’t even mentioned on the sparse Wikipedia page about Bolivian tourism. Perhaps this is due to its relative isolation, perched in a basin high on the Andean Plateau, separated from more populous La Paz by the Cordillera Real, or the difficulties in landing commercial aircraft on shortened runways at high altitudes. Yet Cochabamba appears to be a beautiful town with a climate of “eternal spring” widely regarded as the “gastronomic capital” of Bolivia, surrounded by beauty both natural and man-made.

Still, there’s a limited amount of English-language material out there about the town or its signature dish, Silpancho, from which our current sandwich, Trancapecho, is derived. Silpancho comes to Bolivian Spanish from the native Quechua tongue, where the original term describes the thinly-pounded fried steak that is the centerpiece of this substantial dish. Trancapecho, well, I asked my son Damian to help me translate that and between us we didn’t come up with a definitive meaning. Tranca means a bar (like prison bars) or cudgel/club, or colloquially may mean a drinking bender. Pecho means one’s chest or breast. So does the word Trancapecho indicate a heart attack or a blow to the chest? Or does it simply mean this is hangover food? Perhaps someone more familiar with Bolivian Spanish can tell me.

Regardless, there are a number of things that must be prepared in order to make Silpancho, and if you have the ingredients for Silpancho along with a bread roll, you have the ingredients for Trancapecho.

Ingredient #1: Rice. According to my usual brief and sloppy research, Bolivians commonly use short-grained “Pearl” rice and toast it before cooking, adding nutty flavor and aromatic qualities to the rice. We have a bag of Botan Calrose rice, nominally a sushi rice, but perfect for this use.

Ingredient #2: Fried potatoes. There wasn’t a real consensus in the videos I watched for the type of potato used by Bolivians, perhaps because Bolivia produces so many different kinds of potatoes. However, the potatoes are typically boiled, cooled down, peeled, and then fried in a half-inch or so of vegetable oil.

Ingredient #3: Thin breaded steak. Some of the videos I watched appeared to use ground beef rather than steak, but I can’t imagine creating a patty as thin and wide as this dish requires–it should be roughly the size of the plate–and not have it fall apart on me as soon as I tried to move it. So I sided with those who were using actual steaks. And since anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I bought beef tenderloin steaks, or filet mignon, as I felt it would be a tender meat to bite through even after being breaded and deep fried.

First, I put the steak between two layers of wax paper and pounded it out to nearly the size I needed.

Next, I put down a layer of breadcrumbs with just a touch of salt under the steak, and put an unseasoned layer atop the steak. I’m pounding it thin enough that salting both sides would be overseasoning it.

This embeds the breadcrumbs tightly into the meat, and also helps tenderize the steak further. Come to think of it, I probably could have used a much cheaper cut for this.

Then the steak is fried, just for a minute or so per side, in a quite large pan, in about a half an inch of vegetable oil.

Ingredient #4: a fried egg or two. It appears that they often deep fry these eggs in the same oil they use for the meat. I tried this and didn’t have much success–the violent reaction caused by dropping the eggs into the frying oil caused a bubbly blistered mess, with yolks that had cooked hard through by the time the whites were done. I made mine sunny-side up instead, with a mix of a little butter and a little of the frying oil, to spoon over the top.

Ingredient #5: A salad I guess you’d call it? It’s a blend of vegetables–onions, tomatoes, chili peppers–dressed with a little salt, oil, and vinegar. Some versions put a soft cheese into the salad, and some add quirquiña, a local name for the herb referred to in Puebla, Mexico as papalo.

Ingredient #6: llajua. This is a ubiquitous table condiment in Bolivia, made daily in the home, a mashed or blended combination of tomatoes, locoto chilies, salt, and quirquiña. It is not really possible to source quirquiña in Illinois in December, so I substituted a combination of parsley and cilantro. As for the unique locoto chilies, I ordered them in paste form from Amazon.

With these ingredients, one can assemble a plate of Silpancho. The llajua isn’t 100% necessary I suppose, but it’s delicious, and adds a spicy dose of umami to a dish that is largely made up of the carb-on-carb double whammy of potatoes and rice.

Carb-on-Carb… on Carb?

Now, there’s always that street food impulse. If you can’t fry something and put it on a stick, the other option is to stuff it inside some bread and wrap it up in paper. I don’t know the history of Trancapecho, though according to Wikipedia it is mainly served in markets and near the local college, so the street food theory appears sound.

I tried to research the proper bread roll for a Trancapecho, but every search for Bolivian bread recipe results in several thousand recipes for cuñapé, a small round bread made from yuca starch and cheese similar to the Colombian buñuelo, with a few side excursions into salteños, or Bolivian empanadas. However, the videos I watched on the sandwich preparation–watched without fully understanding, as they were all in Spanish with one odd French exception–the rolls appeared to be round flattish bread rolls. This telera would have to do.

The bread roll is cut open partially, leaving a hinged end that might keep some of the ingredients from falling out of the sandwich if you were to eat it out of hand. Some of the videos showed the sandwich-makers starting by adding the steak to the roll, then cradling the rice atop the steak. Still others started by mounding the rice directly onto the bread. I went with the latter approach, though I can’t really say why. Perhaps I was hoping that the massive steak would hide from me the fact that I was eating rice in a sandwich.

Next up is the steak, in a ludicrously large proportion that dwarfs the roll intended to contain it.

Atop the steak, I placed the pieces of fried potato. In my research I found that sometimes fried yuca was used in trancapecho, in addition to or in place of the potato. I wish I’d realized that before making this, but since I’m shooting my caloric allotment for the weekend with this one sandwich already, I doubt I’ll revisit it with yuca.

Next comes the fried egg, again done sunnyside up, though slightly less skillfully than the eggs I cooked for Silpancho earlier.

Finally, the salad, which is often strewn atop the sandwich in an avalanche of red, white, and green, burying the remaining ingredients. I used a little more restraint, but to be honest, this thick pile of carbs and proteins needs the greenery.

By a happy chance of fate, the steak was actually a good size for the bun after all, once the bread’s hinge was closed and the top part of the bun folded it back over.

Now perhaps I’ve been mildly mocking this sandwich all along. But I’ll be honest–it’s way better than it has any right to be, especially when adding a bit of the llajua to each bite. I can’t say the rice is much of a player, though it certainly adds a textural element. But it’s also a somewhat glutinous short-grained rice and sticks to itself well enough to not constantly spill out of the sandwich and become a nuisance. Breaded steak, yolky fried egg, and a pico de gallo analog are a natural combination for a sandwich, and who wouldn’t want fried potatoes of some kind to go with that?

Taken as a whole, there’s just enough protein between the steak and egg to keep the carbs from taking over, and just enough carbs to keep it from being too protein heavy. I should have used more of the salad–the sandwich really, really needs it to brighten up what might otherwise be a fairly monotonous pile of food, no matter how well each item was cooked individually. But the llajua gave it the extra flavor boost it needed and kept things moving along. I finished the whole thing–with a little help from my wife and son.