If you’ve ever taken a Bogotá food tour, you know that every dish hides a story. Spoonful after spoonful, the message began to reveal itself.
I didn’t know if the others were having the same experience.
The potatoes had something written on them. It was barely visible, but it said they had been grown and separated from their herd that very morning. Among them, a few still carried markings I managed to decipher, though they had almost faded away. Maybe they were easier for me to see because, when I was young, I was always passionate about archaeology and the study of inscriptions.
They said they came from a small town near Bogotá, and that they had been brought to the restaurant in a truck earlier that morning. Many had been chosen—brave and ready to fulfill their mission in life: to dodge other recipes and become the pride of their roots.
The dream of every Colombian potato: to end up in a good ajiaco santafereño.
And it wasn’t easy. You had to be almost perfect to catch the attention of the chef at the door. Otherwise, you could end your glorious life in a pot of hot oil, turned into French fries.
Becoming an ajiaco potato was already an achievement. But being the potato of the Christmas Eve ajiaco… that was almost divine. On that day, people in Bogotá cherish and enjoy this thick soup as if it were sacred.
Potatoes from the Cundiboyacense highlands, from the time they were small, had a single purpose. They prepared for it. They competed in potato school to be round, firm, almost perfect.
I managed to read that they had a kind of underground university where, as they grew, they learned to capture the microorganisms of Colombia’s black soil. That’s how they absorbed the nutrients needed to become food.
The day they were pulled from the earth by the farmers of the cold lands was as glorious as the moment an athlete is chosen for the Olympics.
Becoming an ajiaco potato in Bogotá… was winning the gold medal.
The soup was speaking to me. It was telling me its origins.
On the other side of the table, the guide was explaining what ajiaco was, as if we were in the middle of a Bogotá food tour, but I had my own narrator.
Who better than the potato itself to tell me what ajiaco means to the people of Bogotá?
By Fredy Calderón
Video about Bogotá’s gastronomy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ9O6alRYhs
Recommended food experience:
https://thetruecolombianexperience.com/product/bogota-food-experience/
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