Chaco Food & Traditional Cuisine

Food in the Chaco is a collision of three traditions and, above all, of what will keep in heat.

Beef is the foundation. This is ranching country, and the asado — meat grilled slowly over wood coals — is the standard meal for any occasion, cooked over quebracho, which burns hot and long.

Mennonite cooking brings German and Russian-Mennonite dishes and, more importantly, an excellent dairy industry: the colonies produce Paraguay’s cheese, butter and yoghurt, and the co-op bakeries make rye bread, cakes and pastries you would not expect to find four hundred kilometres into thorn scrub.

Paraguayan staples follow from the east: cassava with everything, and the maize and cheese breads that define the national cuisine.

And terere, iced mate, is drunk continuously — a practical response to the heat as much as a custom.

Asado is the region’s meal: ribs, flank and offal salted and cooked slowly over quebracho embers, eaten with cassava and a sharp onion and tomato salad. The beef here is grass-fed and very good.

Sopa paraguaya, despite the name a dense cornbread with cheese, onion and egg, baked in a tray and cut into squares — the national dish and the standard accompaniment to grilled meat.

Chipa, a ring of cassava-starch bread with cheese and anise, eaten at any hour and sold by vendors at every bus stop.

Mennonite dairy: fresh and matured cheeses from the colony cooperatives, and the yoghurt and butter that supply the whole country.

Rollkuchen and zwieback, fried dough eaten with watermelon, and double rolls, both carried from the Russian Mennonite tradition.

Also: mbeju, a cassava and cheese griddle cake; and grilled river fish where the Paraguay river is reachable.

The cooperative supermarkets in Filadelfia and Loma Plata are the region’s food hubs and are startlingly well stocked — German sausage, local cheese, imported goods — because the co-ops supply hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

Terere is the social institution. A thermos of iced water, a guampa of yerba and a metal straw, shared around a group and refilled by one person who serves everyone in turn. Being offered it is an invitation to join, and accepting is the right answer; wiping the straw is an insult.

Eating hours: lunch is the main meal, taken early and followed by a long pause through the worst of the heat.

Asado is a weekend social occasion rather than a meal, and it takes hours.

Stock up before leaving the colonies — there is very little beyond them.

No wine is made in the Chaco — the heat and the water rule it out — and Paraguay’s drinking culture runs on other things entirely.

Terere is the national drink and is drunk more here than anywhere, because it works: yerba mate steeped in iced water, often with crushed medicinal herbs called yuyos pounded into the water, shared from a horn or wooden guampa. It is a genuine thermoregulation strategy in 45-degree heat and it is also the whole social fabric — groups form around a thermos.

Caña, sugarcane spirit, is the country liquor, drunk neat or in a caipirinha-style mix, and it is produced in the east.

Beer is drunk very cold; Pilsen is the national brand.

Mosto, fresh sugarcane juice, is sold from presses and is the non-alcoholic staple alongside terere.

Argentine and Chilean wine is available in the colony supermarkets at reasonable prices.