Free Wisdom Online: Food in Bolivia

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Having mentioned the three occasions on which we had pizza, I feel
compelled to clarify that we _did_ try other things in Bolivia.  Our
introduction to Bolivian cuisine started in Santa Cruz where we had
some excellent food in my friend's house, mostly involving stews and
soups.  One of them included a strange not-quite-a-potato ingredient
which tasted sort of like a potato but was slighly crunchier and broke
up into curved layers.  Still in Santa Cruz we also tried "tatú" - a
small armadillo - which came in its shell.  (The tatú was intersting,
but not particularly tasty.  It was also a lot of work to separate
the meat from the shell.)

In Samaipata we had some steaks with interesting sauces and a bit of
the "pique macho" that my friend ordered.  Pique macho, which we later
tried again in Sucre, is perhaps the most consistent item on the
menues of Bolivian restaurant.  It involves a pile of french fries
mixed with beef, sausage, tomatos, and onions.

After coming back to Santa Cruz we also tried a variety of excellent
_cruceño_ dishes at la Casa del Camba.  La Casa del Camba is a chain
that even has a [website](http://www.casadelcamba.com/) and is
supposedly planning to open a branch in the US, so keep your eyes
peeled.

After Santa Cruz our food options seemed to be a bit more constrained,
at least in restaurants.  (The markets offered a variety of unusual
foods, but after getting sick in Samaipata we were a bit timid.)  We
had llama a couple of times, which was invariably too tough.  (We
later tried alpaca in Peru which was a lot better.  Peruvians told us
that "nobody" eats llama.)  The most memorable thing for me, however,
was gigantic corn (maiz blanco) that we first had as a side dish in
Sucre - with individual kernels about 10-15 mm in diameter it was at
least twice as big as the corn I've seen before.  It was also very
good.  In Potosi I enjoyed "lenguada" prepared from pig tongue and
spices.

Of the northern Altiplano food, our favorite was the quinoa soup that
we first had during the trip to Tiwanaku.  We later tried quinoa as a
side dish and were not impressed, but the quinoa soup was excellent
everywhere we tried it (both in Bolivia and Peru).

When we later got to Lake Titicaca, the main entre was invariably
"trucha" (salmon trout), though some restaurants offered it cooked in
up to a dozen different ways.  We had a pretty sad version of trucha
on Isla del Sol but later had it properly prepared in Copacabana.

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