Ajiaco (Bogotá Chicken Soup Built on Three Potatoes)

Variations

• Cuban and Chilean ajiaco are different dishes. ko.wikipedia describes ajiaco as "a traditional Latin American soup of Colombia, Cuba, Chile and elsewhere" and notes that the method differs by region. The Cuban one is a much larger stew of several meats and root vegetables and has nothing to do with three potatoes or guascas. This page is Bogotá's ajiaco santafereño, the one counted as a national dish.
• Guascas has no substitute. Galinsoga parviflora, an Andean weed, sold dried by Latin grocers and online. It belongs with kanelbulle's pearl sugar and waakye's sorghum leaves: leave it out and you have a different dish. Without it you get a good potato and chicken soup, and not ajiaco.
• If you cannot get papa criolla: frozen is sold and is the first choice. Failing that, coarsely grate a floury potato into the same slot and it disintegrates much the same way. What that position needs is the falling-apart, not the size.
• The same structure as pot-au-feu: that dish uses three cuts of meat at once and puts the mustard and cornichons on the table for each person. This one uses three potatoes and puts the cream and capers there. Neither finishes its seasoning in the pot.
• Against gratin dauphinois: that page also says the only thing thickening it is starch out of the potatoes, but there the whole job is not rinsing them. Here you deliberately choose a variety for disintegrating.
• Instead of chicken: some households use bone-in beef or short rib. For a vegetarian version leave the chicken out and keep the corn and potatoes, but add another 200g of papa criolla, because the broth is thinner without it.
• What goes on the table: cream, capers and avocado are standard, and ají — a chilli sauce — is often beside them. The rice is eaten alongside rather than stirred into the bowl.

Tips

• Do not put the potatoes in together. That is the whole dish. All three at once and twenty-five minutes later you have a uniform potato mush with neither broth nor pieces in it. 25 minutes, then 15, then 20: the order and the intervals are the recipe.
• Stop stirring once the waxy potatoes go in. Stirring erases the distinction between the three. The same reason cassoulet is never stirred, to keep its beans whole.
• Slice the papa criolla thin. Left whole they do not fully break down in twenty-five minutes and the broth stays thin.
• Season at the end. With nearly two hours of reducing ahead, seasoning judged at the start comes out salty at the finish.
• Guascas in the last ten minutes. In from the start and only the bitterness is left.
• The next day it is a different dish. The potato breaks down further and it comes out much thicker. Loosen it with a little water or broth as you reheat.