Colombian Sanchocho

My daughter's schoolmate's grandmother is from Colombia. She taught me how to make this awesome chicken soup from her childhood in Bogota. I love the avocado and cilantro on top. And the green plantains and yuca are divine! See below for the recipe, the story of our cooking session, and how-to photos.

See How To Do It

Photos: Lindsay Sterling

The Story

From the Mountains of Colombia,

A Revelatory Soup

By Lindsay Sterling

Leonor Londono McGinn, the Colombian-American grandmother of my daughter’s schoolmate, taught me how to make her favorite food from her childhood. It’s a popular soup called sancocho, made with chicken broth, carrots, celery, whole sections of corn on the cob, whole pieces of bone-in chicken, and big chunks of potatoes, yuca root, and green plantains. My favorite part was the slices of avocado and fresh cilantro on top. After forty years of serving avocado room temperature or cold, it was liberating to eat avocado warm, melting into soup.

Yuca, also known as cassava and manioc, is a white-fleshed tropical tuber that was popular among indigenous cultures in South America. It’s like a really waxy, creamy potato. Green plantain, also known as unripe plantain, is similarly starchy, soft, and mild. It looks like a green banana but has no banana flavor. In this soup, the yuca, the plantain, and potato soak up the delicious broth and are really otherworldly. Part of the reason the chicken broth tasted so special was that she added three tablespoons of sofrito, a puree of garlic, onion, culantro (similar to cilantro) and green and red peppers. She also added generous sea salt, black pepper, oregano, thyme, and a little allspice.

Leonor was born in Colombia in a coastal town, but grew up inland in Bogotá. “Bogotá is like Colorado,” she said, “It’s at 9,000 feet! When I go back I get short of breath.” When she was twenty she moved from Colombia to New York. “I found a place in the world in the U.S.” She lived in Babylon on Long Island for 38 years before retiring from a 30-year nursing career and moving to Maine. When I asked her if she still considered herself Colombian, she replied, “I am Colombian, and I am American. I’m very adaptable. Wherever I lived I developed roots.”

Often I find myself craving a clear identity. Leonor and this soup-of-many-ingredients are reminders of how beautiful multiplicity can be. We don’t have to be one thing. We can be many things. Turns out, some of her ancestors in Colombia had come from Poland. And so the soup of identity goes: we are made of many, many ingredients! In addition to being a grandmother, Leonor is also a Reiki practitioner, a watercolor painter, and a spiritual guide. She leads the Wisdom of Life Gathering the first Monday of the month 6-8pm at Leapin’ Lizards in Freeport. Describing the gathering, she said, “We meditate, share what we experience when we meditate, and then work out how we can elevate our moment or our being. We identify our blocks, the early teachings that we incorporated in our life and didn’t serve us. Where are we going and what do we need to get rid of?”

 While we were cooking, Leonor recalled a favorite book, Like Water For Chocolate. She confessed that cooking wasn’t her first-choice activity. She’d rather curl up with a good book. “But what you put into your cooking is reflected,” she said. If I were to put a finger on what Leonor put in her soup, I’d say it was liberation. I could feel it from that first bite of melting avocado. When I cook this soup again, I imagine not only am I going to make a leap closer to the person I want to be, I’m going to remember what she taught me. You can boil green plantains. Happiness is a choice. And there’s nothing stopping you from a new beginning.

For the recipe and how-to photos, click at right. To sign up for the Wisdom of Life Gathering, visit the calendar on www.leapinlizards.biz

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2015 

The Recipe

Colombian Chicken Soup
Sancocho de gallina

As Leanor McGinn from Bogota, Colombia, taught Lindsay Sterling in Durham, Maine, June 2015

Notes: Find culantro, plantains, and yuca at Latin or tropical international markets. If you can't find those ingredients, use cilantro to replace culantro and use extra potatoes and corn to replace the plantains and yuca (pronouced YOU-Kuh). 

Cooking time: 1 hour
Serves: 8

1 green pepper
2 yellow onions
1 head garlic
1 bunch culantro or cilantro
1 whole chicken, cut into 8 pieces or 8 country style chicken pieces
2 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 inch chunks
2 green plantains, peeled (see how-to-video) and cut into 1 inch segments, then halved lengthwise
48 oz. chicken broth
1 lb. yuca, peeled, cut into 3 inch long segments, and quartered lengthwise
(you can buy this already peeled and frozen), or buy it fresh and peel it yourself
1/4 green cabbage, cut into 1-inch thick chunks
2 stalks celery cut into 1/4" pieces
2 carrots cut into 1/4" pieces
3 Tbsp sofrito (see step 1 below)
2 tsp season salt (or blend of sea salt, dehydrated onion and garlic, coriander, black pepper, celery seed, allspice, ginger, red pepper, oregano, basil, thyme, paprika)
2 whole ears of corn, shucked and cut crosswise into four sections each
2 ripe avocados
2 cups white rice (optional)

1. Blend green pepper, onion, garlic and all but a small bunch of culantro or cilantro in blender. Try to add as little liquid as possible (if any) to get the blender moving. Reserve 3 Tbsp of the blended mixture, called sofrito, for making this batch of soup and freeze the remaining sofrito in 3 Tbsp portions for making soup (or rice dishes) in the future. You can fill ice tray cubes or make dollups on a sheet pan or plate. Once frozen, transfer frozen sofrito into Ziploc bag.

2. In a large pot cover chicken pieces with chicken stock and enough water so that liquid is at least 3 inches deep over the top of the chicken. Heat on high. Add diced onion, yuca, plantains, carrots, celery, sofrito, and season salt. Simmer until chicken is cooked or opaque throughout (about 30 minutes) and then remove the chicken pieces from soup. Add the potatoes. After about ten minutes, add the corn pieces. When the potatoes are soft, add chicken pieces back to pot. Remove large pieces of yuca from the pot, and place on a cutting board. Cut the yuca in half lengthwise, and remove and discard the hard fiber running through the center. Cut lengthwise again into smaller pieces and return to the pot.

3. Season the soup to taste. Garnish each bowl with pieces of avocado and fresh cilantro leaves.

Copyright 2015 Lindsay Sterling