A Serious Thread About Food In Argentina

[cuore]

Weshared a lot in the army,canteens and so forth,and nothing happened,people here share a bombilla and never suffer from diseases,frankly the pathetic fanaticism with cleanliness is laughable.

Man you are quite opinionated!!! Never shared a disease? ?? You must work with very healthy people cause last March my entire office suffered from diarrheafor a week after sharing a mate (except a girl who was on vacation and i. i just never liked it, even though my family has mate the whole day) See the trend? ??

Pathetic fanaticism. ...pppffff

 

[Davidglen77]

Today's lunch:
All you can eat Indian Buffet:
Tandoori Chicken, Yellow Dal, Basmati Rice with peas, Curry goat, Saag Paneer, Onion Naan, Salad.
Bottle of San Pellegrino Water
Total: $9.50
Dessert: Fruit Salad of blueberries, rasberries, blackberries, pomegranate seeds, pieces of honeycomb.
Total: $3.00

 

[nlaruccia]

Today's lunch:
All you can eat Indian Buffet:
Tandoori Chicken, Yellow Dal, Basmati Rice with peas, Curry goat, Saag Paneer, Onion Naan, Salad.
Bottle of San Pellegrino Water
Total: $9.50
Dessert: Fruit Salad of blueberries, rasberries, blackberries, pomegranate seeds, pieces of honeycomb.
Total: $3.00

Any photos?

 

[AngelinBA]

Honeycomb?!?!?? I'll just quietly go and die of envy in a corner.........
(What I wouldn't give for some lovely Manuka honey!!)

 

[Matt84]

Spices was money back then,not taste,theydidntcame here,for the food.and it was in the middle ages,not now.

that is such Bull.... Meat never went bad in the middle ages. Animals were kept alive, butchered and minutes later all the meat was gone (eaten or cured, but certainly not with spices which were several thousands times more expensive than meat).

Of course,Iwent to a very prestigous university,in order to become an intelectual,not to cut vegetables,hahaha

You don't become an intelectual, you either are or are not out of intellectual curiosity (which is very much linked to sensory curiosity including the delights of food). How did the prestige part of the university helped you become an intellectual?

 

[Hybrid Ambassador]

Today's lunch:
All you can eat Indian Buffet:
Tandoori Chicken, Yellow Dal, Basmati Rice with peas, Curry goat, Saag Paneer, Onion Naan, Salad.
Bottle of San Pellegrino Water
Total: $9.50
Dessert: Fruit Salad of blueberries, rasberries, blackberries, pomegranate seeds, pieces of honeycomb.
Total: $3.00

I like to admire all the good work those hard working bees do in order for us to savour the elixir from it!
However, don't like to chew on organic waxes but just the juice!

 

[Davidglen77]

Any photos?

No photos, but I will start taking some of my wonderful food options!

 

[nlaruccia]

I refuse to take the opinions of somebody who has never tried that which he disparages very seriously.

Real authorities on food actually eat and cook the food they talk about.

There is crappy food made in every country, and good food as well.

Everybody is different in their tastes- usually, I am the one defending argentine food- but I have been to Thailand, Japan, and Mexico, and eaten delicious, high quality, gourmet food in all three places, and have cooked some of each cuisine myself, imperfectly as a home chef- and I know that each has some very delicious offerings.

I definitely agree, but I must admit that lately the quality of food being served in restaurants and cafes in BA has gone down dramatically. I used to like Argentine food, even though I think it's simple and redundant, but it seems to be getting progressively worse. I used to love coffee here, but the last two years it seems like all the places I order a cortado o cafe con leche serve it totally burnt. The used to give you a masa seca or masa fina to accompany the coffee and now they give you a packaged sugar cookie. The bread is often stale, and the dishes lack flavor. I remember the food being much better years ago. What happened? I ate at the Hotel Alvear Palace La Bourgogn and the fish was indedible. Actually, the last few times I've eaten there the merluza negra was raw. Even at nice restaurants like Fervor in la calle Posadas, you used to be able to get a nice juicy filet mignon and the last time I was there it was like beef jerky. Is it that the servers and managers really don't care about the quality of food?

 

[Joe]

The main reason for the limited food choices is that Argentina has relatively low immigration especially from outside Latin America compared to the USA, Canada and Europe. In these places you have large Chinese, Arab, Persian, Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, etc. communities that allow authentic ethnic cuisines to flourish.

Mexican food is abysmal in Argentina because it has been modified for Argentine tastes. There is no large Mexican community to support authentic and tasty Mexican food as well as sources for the produce.

If you are old enough to have eaten Japanese food in the US in the 70's then you would have had a similar experience. A bastardized version of Japanese food adapted to US tastes more than 50 years after the major immigration of Japanese. It was only with the Japanese economic resurgence in the 70's and 80's was Japanese food in the US revitalized with authentic tastes and interesting fusions like the California Roll.

The answer to your question is simple. Argentina has been relatively isolated from foreign influences on their cuisine with no large ethnic communities to give birth to something different.

 

[Matt84]

That's a very good post Joe, but I would like to add the great centralization and sorry state of the countryside.
Argentina in fact received large waves of ethnic communities encompassing all the lands that stretch from Syria to Sweden that would then fuse with a 300 year old spanish criollo culture, which could be comparable (if very different in taste) to Mexico. No, there's no sizeable or even noticeable East Indian community, and that's a real shame, but there are two historic communities of Japanese and Koreans (the latter could have enjoyed and marketed new traditional barbecues with the abundance of Argentine meat and might have created the "Mongolian Barbecue" before the Taiwanese).
The problem is that those communities were pretty much homogenized in Buenos Aires and the big cities, and the small colonies could not thrive enough to create regional centers of diverse villages and towns to compete with the concept of big cities and large wheat fields. This of course would have required intensive agriculture which was never favoured by original landowners of this country.

To this day there are regional and sometimes unique products (rosa moscheta, carob seed pie) as well as a diversity of game meats not found in other continents but they have not been able to compete with the mainstream SAD (Sad Argentine Diet).