Pig and Fire: Ecuadoran Hornado de Chancho

In cultures all over the world–not every culture, no, but many of them–there is a ritual surrounding the introduction of the pig to the fire. The ritual changes, by the country, by the region, by the individuals involved. The preparation can take days; the cooking process itself, many hours. There are differences between the hog roasts of the UK and the whole-hog barbecue of the American South; the various lechons of Cuba, the Phillipines, Puerto Rico, and Spain; the siu yuk of China, the babi guling of Indonesia, the kālua puaʻa of Hawaii. I personally believe that nobody else in the world has a hog roast like my family holds every Labor Day weekend.

One thing that these traditions all have in common though is that nobody roasts a whole pig unless they are feeding a whole lot of people. The tradition may surround a special occasion, as ours does. Or it may be simply an every day occurrence, at a bustling restaurant or street food stand, say, where hundreds of pounds of melt-in-your-mouth pork is handed over to grateful customers daily, a few ounces at a time.

In Ecuador, roasted pig is called hornado de chancho. Hornado comes from the Spanish word horno, meaning oven or kiln. Chancho is a slang word meaning pig. Far from a special occasion dish, hornado is a feature of everyday life throughout the Andean highlands forming the spine of Ecuador, available at stalls in every town’s market, competing vendors shouting for your attention, offering a taste to entice you to buy their pork. There are hornado stands in Quito, in Ambato, in Cuenca, and all the little towns between.

Hornado is usually served with mote (a simple dish of hominy), salad, llapingachos (a type of pan-fried mashed potato cake) or other potato dishes, avocados, plantain, tostados, etc. And the leftovers–if there are any, a dicey proposition with pork this good–are often made into a sandwich called Sanduche de Hornado or Sanduche de chancho.

Cuenca’s Bakery on Montrose, in the northwest side Chicago neighborhood Old Irving Park, is the namesake of that mountain town in Ecuador, and serves Hornado on weekends in addition to its standard array of baked goods. The pork is served, whether ordered in or to go, in a sectioned styrofoam clamshell containing pork and a section of crisp skin over either mote or rice, with 2 tortillas de papa (another name for llapingachos), a small salad of vinegared lettuce, tomato, and onion, and a plastic tub or two of aji, a mild salsa made from tomate de arbol or “tree tomato,” also called tamarillo.

Tamarillo is not an actual tomato but an egg-shaped fruit also in the Nightshade family, and the fruity, mildly spicy aji or salsa made from it can be found on nearly every table in Ecuador. Cuenca also has a few commercial examples available for sale.

I did not see it listed on their chalkboard-like menu, but the proprietress of Cuenca on my last visit assured me that they do sell Sanduches de Hornado. When I asked what bread they used, she walked me over to their cabinets of baked goods and pointed out a large, dark brown, crescent-shaped roll called pan enrollado. It looks very much like an oversized croissant, and the recipes I’ve seen bear out the comparison–the dough is rolled out, covered in butter and folded multiple times before being rolled into its signature shape. It does not quite have the same fine flakiness of the best croissants but the technique is similar.

Of course it was not my intent to simply buy the sandwich at the bakery but to make one myself. Not to cook a whole pig, no, but just as lechon has its lesser incarnation in pernil or roasted pig leg, so too does Hornado de chancho have hornado de pierna. The only English-language recipe I found–at the same laylita.com website where I have had previous luck with Ecuadoran recipes–calls for marinating a pork leg in beer, citrus, cumin, annatto, and really just a delightfully irresponsible amount of garlic for several days before slow-roasting it for 7-8 hours, regularly brushing the skin with annatto oil to help it crisp up, until it reaches slicing temperature.

Now this was a good pork roast. It made a very tasty dinner with rice, some hominy that I cooked in the pork’s basting liquid, a failed attempt at llapingachos that ended up being a perfectly serviceable cheesy mashed potatoes, and a simple salad of lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, and pickled red onion.

It was not right though. Subsequent investigation has led me to believe that I’d have been better off making a slather of the frankly ridiculous amount of garlic and spices, peeling back the skin, and rubbing that slather directly on the meat. Peeling the skin back may also have helped give that skin more of the crisp chicharron texture I was hoping for. As is, the skin was not really edible, the garlic flavor did not penetrate as deeply into the meat as I’d have liked, and of course it was cooked to a slicing temperature, not a pulling temperature, so the meat did not have the correct texture either.

But I did not have the time or patience to cook an entire new pork leg so the next day I took what was left, slathered an anti-vampire WMD level of garlic and cumin and salt over the meat, placed it in a roasting pan with some beer and citrus juice and foiled the pan tightly to let the meat steam until it fell apart.

It was closer. I’ll take it for now.

I also made pan enrollado following the directions in the video above. They turned out quite nicely.

To make a sandwich, I reheated some of the pork in its pan juices and inserted it into a split pan enrollado with avocado, lettuce, tomato, pickled red onion, and some of the aji con tomate de arbol I’d picked up at Cuenca’s

There is no further need to revise and alter and test the different permutations of this sandwich. I may not have made the best hornado ever, and I do plan to try making that again. The sandwich though could not be better. The juicy, falling apart pork in a bread roll by itself would be a sandwich to reckon with. Lettuce and tomato don’t add much by themselves. But the overall effect, with the fatty avocado and the salty, acidic bite of the pickled onions, ticks all the “great sandwich” boxes.

First we’ve got an interesting bread, not quite as croissant-like as an initial glance might suggest but with a flaky, crusty surface and an open yet buttery crumb. Then there is a compelling focus filling, the hornado. The garlicky pork is intensely savory without overwhelming the palate. Then there is the perfect set of condiments, the avocado analogous to mayonnaise of a North American sandwich and the pickled red onion delivering a massive hit of flavor that cuts through the fattiness of pork and avocado while complementing both.

I did try varying the formula slightly–spreading the avocado on the bread, shredding the lettuce. The results were not much different. Sanduche de Hornado is just a terrific sandwich.

A pork leg is not a small hunk of meat, and chances are I’ll still be trying to finish this pile of pork well after April’s showers have led to May’s flowers. It’s likely that not every bite I take will be a sandwich just like this one. Variety is the spice of life after all, and I can hear a half-dozen other ways to eat this pork calling me–in an omelet or on a salad, with chips and queso or mixed into instant noodles.

As long as I have this pork, those pickled red onions, and some of this pan enrollado though, I will still be making this sandwich again.