Hornado in Quito: what it is, what to order and what to avoid

Overview

Hornado means “baked”, and the name is the whole method: a pig, usually whole, rubbed with garlic, cumin, onion and salt, often with chicha or beer in the marinade, and roasted for hours in a wood-fired oven. What comes out is two things at once. The meat underneath is soft enough to pull with a fork; the skin on top has blistered into a hard, glassy crackling. A plate of hornado is a negotiation between the two, and the skin is the part people argue over.

It is not Quito’s own dish in the strict sense. It belongs to the whole Andean highland, and towns up and down the central valleys claim a version of it, Riobamba among them. The claim nearest the capital is the one in the name it is often written under: hornado de Los Chillos, after the valley just southeast of the city, where Sangolquí has built much of its reputation on roast pork. For someone in Quito that is the practical meaning of the phrase: the valley style, a short ride out of town, and the benchmark the city’s own stalls are measured against.

The pig itself arrived with the Spanish, and the roast is a colonial-era adaptation rather than anything older. What makes the plate unmistakably highland is everything served around the meat: corn, potatoes, and a sour sauce that has no equivalent in the European pork roast it descends from.

What sets hornado apart visually is that the animal is on display. In a market or a roadside dining room the roasted pig sits whole on the counter, head and all, and is carved to order in front of you. By mid-afternoon you can see how much of the day is left by how much of the pig is.

What to order

You ask for un plato de hornado, and what arrives is a composed plate rather than a slab of meat. The components are worth knowing by name, because each one can be asked for, and the plate changes a little from counter to counter:

• mote — boiled hominy, large white corn kernels with a chewy skin. Close to obligatory.
• llapingachos — griddled potato patties with cheese folded inside, a highland dish usually credited to Ambato. Some plates carry these; others carry plain boiled potatoes. If the patties are what you want, ask, because they are often the difference in price.
• agrio — the sauce that defines the plate: a thin, sour liquid spooned over the meat or served beside it, traditionally built on chicha, a fermented corn drink, or on the juice of sour oranges, with onion through it. Each counter has its own. It is what keeps the dish from being heavy.
• curtido — onion and tomato pickled in lime juice, often with coriander.
• a slice of avocado and some lettuce, which are garnish and are treated as such.

Then the vocabulary of the pig. The single most useful word is cuero or cuerito, the crackling. Ask for it by name: it is what regulars want, and a plate without it is a lesser plate. Pierna is the leg, the leanest cut. If you want something to eat walking, a sánduche de hornado puts the pork in a roll, usually with curtido and a spoonful of agrio.

Two harmless things will mark you out. One is leaving the ají untouched: the table sauce is part of the dish, and it is often made with tomate de árbol, so it is fruity as well as hot. Try a little before deciding. The other is not knowing about the yapa, the small extra a market vendor adds for a regular or a friendly customer. Asking for it, lightly, is ordinary.

What to avoid

The enemy of hornado is time, and you can see it on the plate.

Soft skin is the clearest sign that the pork has been sitting. Crackling that bends instead of snapping has spent hours absorbing steam from the meat beneath it, or has been reheated. A pig carved from late morning to early afternoon is the one at its best; the last cuts of the day are drier, and the skin goes first. If the counter has only a few scraps left on the frame, order something else or come back another day.

A tray of pre-cut pork kept warm in a bain-marie is not hornado as anyone here means it. The dish is carved from the roasted animal. Meat already sliced and holding in liquid has lost the contrast between skin and flesh, which is most of the point.

Watch the word on the sign. Fritada is a different dish, pork pieces simmered and then fried in their own fat, and it is often sold at the next stall or from the same kitchen. It is good, and it is not what you came for. Pernil is a roast leg, typically sliced thin for sandwiches. Neither is a cheat, but if what you want is the whole-roast pig with its crackling, look for the animal.

A plate that comes without agrio at all is missing half the dish: ask for it. The sauce is not optional decoration.

Practicalities

Hornado is a lunchtime food, sold at the market counters in the city and in the dining rooms of the valley towns southeast of it, El Tingo and Sangolquí among them. Go before the lunch rush rather than after it: the pig is roasted once, and a plate late in the day is carved from what is left.

A market plate costs roughly $3 to $6, with llapingachos or a larger portion pushing it toward the top. In a seated restaurant, especially a roadside one in the valley, expect roughly $8 to $12. A plate well under the market range usually means a small portion with little skin; a plate well above the restaurant range is paying for the dining room, not for the pig.

Carry cash, in small notes and coins, for anything in a market. Cards are uncommon at the counters, and a twenty is unwelcome for a three-dollar plate. Ecuadorian centavo coins circulate alongside United States ones and are worth the same.

Eat it at the counter or table where it is carved, and eat the crackling first. It is the only part of the plate that gets worse with every minute.