Heart Healthy Food in Paraguay- Sopa Paraguya

Yesterday and today I have been in Caaguazú with my host family celebrating my host mother’s sister’s (so I guess like my aunt’s) 70^th birthday.  We came into town yesterday and cooked up a storm all day getting ready for the party.  The pictures below take you through how to make Sopa Paraguya which normally sopa in Spanish is a soup but here is a sort of corn bread.  This is not the first time that I have helped make sopa here but this is the largest scale that I have helped make it at.  Enjoy the pictures and recipe.

Step 1: Get a lot of pig fat like 2 kg and add it to a laundry wash bin, and mix very well.

Step 2: Add 2 dozen eggs.

 



 

Step 3: Add one slab of 2 kg of cheese, but make sure you have two more to add later!  This is the cheese that I help my family make every day and usually we are able to produce 2-3 kg per day so we have been saving up for this.

 

Step 4: Add 6 kg of corn that has been dried, boiled, cooled, and then ground into flour. This is corn that we had picked and then dried, and then taken off the cob.

 

Step 5: Add 4 liters of a liquid.  I’m not sure what the English name for it is but it is the milk substance that is left over in the container when we make the cheese that we usually feed to the pigs but saved this week.  Also later on she said we needed more liquid so we added about one more liter of fresh milk and ANOTHER liter of vegetable oil (in case we didn’t have enough with all the pig fat!)

 

 

Step 6: Stir like crazy, my mom said this is what makes it the best sopa is to stir a lot and she says it’s a good arm work out.

Step 7: Add about a cup of salt, my mom doesn’t use measuring cups or anything just keeps adding things, tests it and then says what it needs more of.

 

 

 

Step 8: The other 4 kg of cheese left from step 3.

 

 

Stir for about ten minutes, taste and then get your pans ready to go.  Every time we make sopa we have to visit a banana plant and cut off the leaves and put them in the pan to keep the sopa from sticking to the side.  You then pour the batter into the pan and then cut the banana leaves down because you don’t want them to burn too much in the outdoor oven. 

 

We had six large pans of sopa by the time we were done.  We had to walk it all over to the neighbor’s house because they don’t have an outdoor oven here. 

 

So after an hour getting that prepped (which we started before we started making the sopa, we had to get rid of all the hot coals and then put in the pans in.  We covered both entrances and let them cook for about 20-30 minutes and then pulled them out.   

 

 

The finished product!  I have no idea how many calories one piece of this has but with 2 kg pig fat + 1 L vegetable oil+ 6 kg cheese and everything else we probably don’t want to know.

Also before we left home in Yukyry Central we went on a little killing streak with our farm animals and here when someone has a birthday you give them gifts just like the states.  Here though you give people dead animals so we came with a small pig and chickens.  The meat my mom had worked on in the morning and just let sit in the salt and lemon juice all day.  After the sopa was done we restarted a fire in the oven and let that go for about an hour while we took the sopa out, cut it up, and then put meat in the pans.  So by the time it was all said and done we had one small pig, and about 9 chickens that went into the stove.  It doesn’t take meat very long to cook in the oven because it is so hot and cooking from all sides but it turns out wonderful. 

 

 

This is a picture of a very upset mother chicken because it was after dark when we were trying to cook the meat and she was trying to put her chicks to sleep but we kept interrupting them because she put them right next to the stove and we had to keep disturbing them to go back and forth but I was just amazed by how many chicks (9!) she could fit under her wing and around her.

 

 

 

This is a picture of my mom on the left followed by her sister and then me.  Also Paraguayans don’t smile very much but I love the picture because my mom isn’t smiling at all, the sister is a little bit, and then I have a huge smile on my face. 

We also had a wonderful mariachi band show up for a performance.

Overall it was a wonderful day full of working hard cooking and getting ready for the big party but all of the food turned out wonderful and everyone had a good time.