Tostones & Mojo in Nicaragua: How I Fell in Love with Latin Food

Marisella Veiga, Cuban refugee, teacher, author, and cook, beat a partially cooked slice of golden plantain into a disc beneath a greasy brown paper shopping bag. She then refried the disc until it was crisp, added a dash of salt and baptized it in a tangy mojo sauce made of garlic, lime juice, and hot oil.

Related: Tostones, Madures, Chifles, Oh My! An Easy Guide to Cooking with Plantains

She was making tostones, of course. That was in St. Augustine, Florida. Today, I live in Nicaragua, where tostones are served on a toothpick with salty fried cheese. A fast food chain in Quito, Ecuador serves them alongside hash-browns and the square egg concoction American fast food dives call breakfast. 

Tostones in Nicaragua are not cooked the way I remember Marisella teaching me in my kitchen. That day we rolled croquetas de jamón, sipping Modelos with lime and salt and crooning to the music of a trumpeter. The tostones I’ve come to know in Nicaragua are thick and often uncooked in the center, and few restaurants season them once they are rescued from the hot oil—a culinary faux pas that always leaves me reaching for the salt shaker. [pagebreak]

Venturing to different grocery stores in Managua, I search for my ultimate, and surprising, cooking tool: the brown paper bag. 

I finally locate it at a local frutería that also supplies me with plantains. After scoring the peel of the fruit, I carefully remove it, then slice even sized rounds an inch to an inch and a half wide. Folding the bag in half with a plantain slice in-between, I pound them into half-dollar size discs. I recall Marisella laughing. She used to call this a stress reducer. I concur and relish not using the tostonera.

Finally, the oil is hot for frying. In go the slices for their first submersion. The now flattened rounds return to the oil to crisp. They are quickly removed and drained on the same paper bag—salt following on both sides.

Now the mojo. The garlic has been marinating in lime juice and a small portion of the hot oil is added, causing the garlic to infuse quickly. The crisp first bite of the fried golden banana with pungent bits of garlic from the mojo makes it difficult to return to French fries or boiled potatoes. Every time I eat tostones, I think of Marisella, and I hear her affectionately calling after me by the nickname – chancho – she assigned.