How to eat ajiaco

Ajiaco is a Colombian dish which features on most menus here in Bogotá, but what is it exactly, and more to the point, HOW do you eat it?!

Ajiaco is a type of soup containing potato, guascas (a type of herb), usually chicken, and with corn (like giant sweetcorn, but not sweet), rice and avocado served on the side. When it was first presented to me by my mother-in-law, I wasn’t quite sure how to go about eating it. My first thought was.. rice AND potato in the same soup?? No.. And I stubbornly ate the soup on its own and the sides separately.. except I normally left the avocado (as I wasn’t a big fan of it when I first arrived in Colombia) and ate the rice and a bit of the corn on their own. I wasn’t a fan of ajiaco in the beginning because I just didn’t get it. I was definitely missing something.

Then, one day, I decided to copy my boyfriend’s method of eating it, just to see if it would make a difference. And there it was; I had found out that all this time, I had been eating ajiaco all wrong! So here is how to eat ajiaco (it really isn’t that complicated!):

– Take the corn cob and scrape all the corn off into the soup.

– Empty the rice into the soup and mix with your spoon.

– Scrape a bit of avocado onto your spoon, dip it into the soup and eat everything together!

– If you’re keen on cream and capers, you can also add these too (though I’m not a fan!)

And there you have it – how to eat ajiaco! My favourite one is by Cali Vea 🙂