A bandeja paisa is seven things on one plate: red beans cooked with green plantain, white rice, ground beef, a slab of crisp chicharrón, a chorizo, a fried egg and slices of sweet fried plantain. Arepa and avocado go alongside. It needs the largest plate in the house, which is where the name comes from, since bandeja means tray.
Nothing on it is difficult on its own. The whole challenge is getting seven separate things hot at the same moment, and that is what most recipes leave you to work out for yourself.
Where it comes from, and why it has four names
The ancestor of this plate was the fiambre or envuelto of the Antioquian muleteers: beans, rice and whatever protein there was, wrapped in a bijao leaf and carried into the mountains to feed a man through a day of hauling goods. That goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
What is on the plate today is much more recent than most people assume. The composed platter was put together in the 1950s, when hotel and tourism people set out to design a dish that would represent Antioquian cooking and project abundance. It does not appear in Colombian cookbooks before then.
Which is also why it answers to so many names. Bandeja montañera comes from montañero, mountain-dweller, what paisas were called. Bandeja de arriero points back at the muleteers. Bandeja antioqueña and típico montañero are the same platter again. If you have eaten one under any of those names, you have eaten this.
The order to cook it in
This is the part worth reading twice, because a bandeja paisa goes wrong through timing rather than through technique.
- The night before: put the beans in to soak. There is no way around this and no substitute for it.
- Day before, if you can: the beans, the hogao and the ground beef. All three are better on the second day and all three reheat perfectly. This is what Colombian households actually do.
- An hour before eating: the rice, which holds fine covered off the heat.
- Last, and in this order: chicharrón, then plantain in the fat it leaves behind, then the eggs. None of these three survive waiting.
If you try to make all seven components on the same afternoon, in one pass, something will be cold. Spreading it over two days is not cheating; it is how the dish is cooked where it comes from.
Hogao, made once and used twice
Hogao is the Colombian sofrito, and it is the only thing on this plate that touches two of the other components. Scallion, onion, tomato and garlic, chopped fine and cooked gently until they stop being separate ingredients and turn into a sauce.
Half goes into the beans, half into the ground beef. Read that before you start, because the instinctive move is to tip the whole panful into the bean pot and then wonder what the beef is missing.
Chicharrón is not pork rinds
Worth being blunt about, because the shopping goes wrong here more than anywhere else on the list.
What you want is a slab of fresh pork belly with the skin still attached, cut into thick strips. It goes into a dry pan and cooks in the fat it releases, until the skin blisters and crisps and the meat underneath is tender. You end up with something that has crunch on one side and soft pork on the other.
What you do not want is the bagged snack sold as pork rinds or chicharrones in American supermarkets. That is skin only, already fried and dried, and there is no meat in it. It cannot be cooked into this.
The chorizos go into the same pan, in the fat the pork gives up.
Two plantains, two jobs
The ingredient list has a green plantain and a ripe one, and they are not interchangeable.
The green one is peeled, diced and cooked into the beans, where it goes soft and starchy and thickens the pot. It is barely sweet at all.
The ripe one, the one whose skin has gone mostly black, gets sliced and fried into tajadas, which land on the plate sweet and caramelised against everything else, which is salty. That contrast is deliberate and it is half the pleasure of the plate. A plantain that is still yellow will not caramelise; wait for the black skin.
What this version leaves out
The recipe below covers seven components. A bandeja paisa as served in Medellín usually carries two more, and it is more honest to say so than to pretend otherwise.
Arepa and avocado belong on the plate. Neither needs cooking to speak of: half an avocado sliced, and an arepa on the griddle while the eggs fry. Some versions also add patacones, and in Antioquia you will occasionally meet morcilla as well.
None of them are in the ingredient list here, so buy them separately if you want the full platter.
The morning after
There will be leftovers. A bandeja paisa is built to be too much, and that is not an accident either.
What is left becomes calentado the next morning: everything fried up together with fresh tomato and onion and eaten with an egg on top. Rice and beans are the classic combination for it, and a bandeja leaves plenty of both.
Related recipes
- Traditional beans — the component that takes longest, on its own.
- Bean casserole — the same ingredients in a smaller, simpler form.
- Patacones — if you want the extra green plantain component.
- Traditional arepas — the piece this recipe leaves off the plate.
Bandeja Paisa FAQ
A very large platter from Antioquia, in northwest Colombia, carrying red beans, white rice, ground beef, crisp chicharrón, chorizo, a fried egg and sweet fried plantain, usually with arepa and avocado alongside. Bandeja means tray, and paisa is what people from Antioquia call themselves. It is widely treated as Colombia's national dish.
Because the paisa region is mountain country and its people were called montañeros. The same platter turns up as bandeja montañera, bandeja de arriero, bandeja antioqueña or simply típico montañero, depending on who is serving it. They are the same idea under different names.
No. Colombian chicharrón is a slab of fresh pork belly with the skin still on, fried in its own fat until the skin puffs and crisps and the meat underneath stays tender. Bagged pork rinds are only the puffed skin, already cooked and dry. They are a different product and they will not work here.
The Colombian sofrito: scallion, onion, tomato and garlic chopped fine and fried gently until they collapse into a sauce. In this recipe it is made once and used twice, half into the beans and half into the ground beef, so do not tip it all into the pot at the first opportunity.
The beans, the hogao and the ground beef all keep well and are better made the day before, which is what Colombian households actually do. What has to be done at the last minute is the frying: chicharrón, plantain and eggs all lose everything if they sit. Reheat the rest while you fry.
Calentado, the Colombian leftover breakfast. Whatever is left gets fried up the next morning with fresh tomato and onion and eaten with a fried egg on top. A bandeja paisa is generous enough that this is less a possibility than a certainty.
📖 Recipe
Ingredients
- 1½ cups red beans (cargamanto if you can find them; soaked overnight, see step 1)
- 1 lb chicharrón (skin-on pork belly) (fresh pork belly with the skin on, not the bagged puffed snack sold as pork rinds)
- 1½ lb ground beef
- 3 chorizos (Colombian chorizo is a firm fresh sausage cooked whole; Mexican chorizo crumbles and behaves differently)
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup rice
- 1 large ripe plantain (the skin should be mostly black; that is when it is sweet)
- 3 large scallions (cebolla larga), chopped
- 3 ripe tomatoes (for the hogao)
- ½ onion (a regular onion; the original calls it cebolla de huevo)
- 1 garlic clove
- ½ carrot, grated (goes into the beans)
- 1 green plantain (peeled and diced, into the beans; this is not the same plantain as the ripe one)
- Oil
- Salt and pepper, to taste
Notas
Instructions
- Soak the beans overnight in plenty of water.
- Finely chop the scallions, onion, garlic and tomatoes and fry them in a little oil over medium heat for 5 to 7 minutes, stirring so they do not catch. This is hogao, the Colombian sofrito, and it gets used twice.
- Put the beans into a pressure cooker with their soaking water, adding more water if needed. Cook under pressure for about 20 minutes, then release the pressure and take the lid off carefully.
- Add half the hogao, the peeled and diced green plantain, and the grated carrot.
- Cook under pressure for another 20 to 25 minutes, then take it off the heat and set aside.
- Cook the rice: 2½ cups of water to 1 cup of rice, with salt and a little oil. Cook over high heat until the water on the surface has gone, then lower the heat, cover and give it 15 minutes more.
- Fry the ground beef in a little oil with salt, pepper and the rest of the hogao. Set it aside when it is done.
- In a pan, fry the chicharrón and the chorizos in the fat that renders out of the pork, until the chicharrón is crisp and golden.
- Slice the ripe plantain on the diagonal and fry the slices in oil until they are golden at the edges. Lift them out.
- In a pan with a little butter, fry the eggs one at a time and set them aside.
- Serve on the largest plate you own: a portion of rice, a portion of beans, a portion of ground beef, a piece of chicharrón, a chorizo, a fried egg and a couple of slices of ripe plantain.
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