Taste Ecuador
Ecuador
A small country with three kitchens: the potato-and-cheese sierra, the plantain-and-seafood coast, and the Amazon in between.
Ecuadorian food divides by altitude. The highlands eat potatoes in every form, soups at every lunch, hornado and fritada pork with mote corn, llapingachos with peanut sauce and avocado. The coast eats green plantain as bolones and chifles, prawns and fish as soupy ceviche and encebollado, rice with everything, and peanut and coconut sauces in Manabí and Esmeraldas. Everywhere there is ají on the table, a fixed-price almuerzo of soup, main and juice, and tropical fruit juices by the glass. Cacao and bananas are the big exports.
5 recipes · 1 cuisine
All dishes 5
- 1 hr
Encebollado
Encebollado de pescado
Ecuador's coastal fish and yuca soup, topped with lime-pickled red onion — the breakfast that cures Saturday night.
Easy
- 1 hr 45 min
Llapingachos
Ecuadorian highland potato patties stuffed with cheese, griddled in achiote oil and served with peanut sauce and a fried egg.
Medium
- 50 min
Locro de papa
Ecuadorian highland potato and cheese soup, orange with achiote, finished with avocado — nothing like the Argentine locro.
Easy
- 1 hr 30 min
Ecuadorian prawn ceviche
Ceviche de camarón
Coastal Ecuador's cooked-prawn ceviche in a cold tomato, lime and orange broth — soupy, sweet-sour, eaten with popcorn and chifles.
Easy
- 1 hr
Bolón de verde
Ecuadorian coastal breakfast: green plantain mashed with cheese and crisp pork, shaped into fist-sized balls and fried.
Easy
Regional cuisines
Think you know Ecuador food?
5 quiz dishes. Optional — Passport stamps still come from cooking.
Take the Ecuador food quizFood history
The Andean peoples domesticated potatoes and cooked thick ruqru soups long before the Inca took Quito. Spanish conquest brought pork, dairy, rice, cumin and achiote-led frying; plantain came via Africa and the Caribbean to the coast. Guayaquil's cacao boom and then the banana and prawn industries of the twentieth century shaped coastal cooking and made encebollado and ceviche cart food. Sierra and costa still argue over which is the national cuisine.