Pastel de choclo: Chile's summer corn bake

Overview

Pastel de choclo is a baked dish that hides its best ingredient at the bottom. On top is a thick, soft layer of ground fresh sweetcorn — choclo, the Andean word for the maize cob — cooked down with milk or lard and basil until it sets into something between a purée and a custard. Under it is the pino: minced beef softened with onion and cumin, and buried in that a hard-boiled egg, a few black olives, sometimes raisins and a piece of chicken on the bone. It is baked in its own dish until the corn topping firms and browns, and it is eaten straight from that dish with a spoon.

Calling it a Santiago dish would overstate the case, and it is worth being honest about that: pastel de choclo is Chilean before it is anything more local, cooked the length of the country and claimed in slightly different forms across the border in Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. What Santiago gives you is the easiest place to find a good one, in the picadas — plain, unshowy neighbourhood eating houses — that treat it as a fixture of the summer menu rather than a curiosity for visitors.

There is no tidy origin legend to tell here, which is itself worth saying, because so many dishes come wrapped in one. What the dish is, is legible in its parts: the corn is pre-Columbian and Andean, the domestic staple of the people who farmed these valleys long before contact; the layered, oven-baked construction with beef, egg and olives is Spanish colonial home cooking. The dish is the meeting of the two, and that is documented history rather than folklore.

What to order

You do not really order variants of pastel de choclo the way you order variants of other dishes — it arrives as itself, one composed portion — but there are words worth having and choices worth making.

The topping is the whole argument, so it helps to know that the good version is made from ground fresh choclo, coarse and pale gold and flecked, with a faint sweetness and the grassy note of the basil cooked into it. Some kitchens dust the top with sugar before baking so it caramelises into a thin brittle crust over a savoury filling — a sweet-and-salt combination that is traditional but not universal, and entirely a matter of the cook’s house style. Neither version is wrong.

Inside, the vocabulary is small:

• pino — the meat base, the same seasoned beef-and-onion mixture that fills the country’s empanadas. In pastel de choclo it is wetter and more generous.
• presa — a piece of chicken, usually on the bone, tucked into the pino. Not every version includes it; a pastel built on beef and chicken together is the fuller one.
• pebre — the fresh Chilean table salsa of chopped coriander, onion, chilli and oil. It is more often a companion to bread, but a spoonful cuts the richness well and is worth asking for.

The one thing that marks a visitor out, harmlessly, is surprise at the sweetness — the raisins, the sugar crust where there is one, the mild corn. It is meant to sit between sweet and savoury, and eating it expecting a straightforwardly savoury pie is the commonest way to be disappointed by a perfectly good one.

What to avoid

The failure here is a season, not a swindle, and it is specific: corn.

Pastel de choclo depends on fresh choclo, and fresh choclo has a season. Made off it, from frozen or tinned kernels blitzed with cornflour to hold together, the topping turns pale, smooth, uniform and flat — a pallid paste with none of the coarse, faintly sweet character that is the entire point. A version served in the depths of winter is very likely this, and the smoothness is the tell: the real thing is textured, with the bruise of the grinding still visible in it. If the top layer looks like a pipeable purée rather than something that was mashed, the corn came out of a bag.

The second thing is proportion. A thin skin of corn over a deep pit of pino is a kitchen economising on the ingredient that costs it the most effort. The topping should be the larger half of what is in the dish, not a lid.

And be wary of a pastel de choclo offered with equal confidence in every season on a menu aimed squarely at visitors — photographs on the board, a fixed tourist price, corn all year round. The dish’s honesty is tied to its calendar, and a kitchen pretending it has none is telling you something.

Practicalities

The season is the first practical fact. Pastel de choclo is a summer dish, roughly December to March in the southern hemisphere, when the fresh corn comes in; that is when the picadas put it on and when it is worth eating. Around the September national holidays you will see it appear early on more ambitious menus, but the reliable window is high summer. Order it then, and be a little sceptical of it in July.

It is a sit-down dish, not street food, and it costs accordingly — roughly 6,000 to 12,000 Chilean pesos for a portion in an ordinary eating house, more where there is a wine list and a view. A markedly cheap one, especially out of season, is the frozen-corn version; a markedly dear one is usually buying you the room rather than a better bake.

The detail worth knowing is the dish it comes in. A proper pastel de choclo is baked and served in a heavy black earthenware bowl — a paila of fired clay, the pottery Chile makes in villages like Pomaire — which holds the heat so the thing keeps cooking and stays scalding at the table. It arrives genuinely too hot to eat, the corn still bubbling at the edges, and it is meant to. Give it a few minutes, break the crust with the edge of your spoon, and go down through the corn into the pino and the egg in the same mouthful; that layering is how it is built to be eaten.

Restaurants and picadas take cards without trouble, so the cash habit that matters for street food is not a concern here. What matters more is timing: lunch is the natural meal for it, it is filling enough to be the whole of one, and a picada that has just opened for the midday service is where the day’s pastel is freshest.