An Afternoon in Paute / El Hornado

Sunday afternoon Leslie and I decided to take an afternoon trip to Paute, a small town to the north in Cuenca's province. We had heard that the best hornado in the world, a traditional Ecuadorian dish I'll talk about in a minute, could be found in Paute so I was on a mission. We took the city bus over to the terminal terrestre, which cost us $.25 each as usual. The terminal tax was ten cents, and the hour-long bus ride to Paute cost us $.75 each. It helps that Ecuador produces its own petroleum. When we got to Paute, we checked out the Sunday market, which was interesting even though there weren't too many people there. Paute is a vacation house spot for middle-class Cuencanos, who all went on vacation last weekend so I think the normal Sunday crowd in Paute was still in Cuenca this time.

We made change for a 20 in a CD/DVD store, where I bought 12 hours on merengue music on an mp3 cd for a dollar. Then we headed over to "La Plaza del Hornado."



Hornado means two things here. One thing it means is pulled pork, pulled directly from a whole roasted pig. Hornado is also a traditional dish: hornado served with mote (a kind of corn), a tomato-onion salad, a piece of the pig's roasted skin (which tastes like pork-flavored extra crunchy cheese-it), and llapingachos. Llapingachos are fried potato balls; I'm not sure how they're made. This lady was kind enough to let us take our pictures with her and her hornado. While we were taking the pictures, she said "Hornado is so cute, isn't it?" to which I replied "Of course it is." That makes a lot more sense in Spanish, but it's a lot funnier in English. The lady also tols us that she has sisters who live in the United States and that she would tell them that we took her picture and put it on the internet. At the end of this post, I'm going to put a list of keywords so that her sisters will be able to find this post if they do end up looking for it.

After eating a couple different plates of hornado from a couple different booths in the plaza, and yes they were definitely worth the trip, we got some salchipapas (a plate of french fries served with a little sausage, mayonnaise and ketchup) and ice cream and Leslie did some vegetable shopping in the market and we came home. Paute isn't really a site the needs to be seen like some other towns around Cuenca, but it was definitely worth the trip to try the best hornado in the world. If any of you reading this ever plan to come visit us down here, we probably won't spend an entire afternoon going to Paute but I'd love to take you to a market in Cuenca to give it a try.

(Hornado - Paute - La Plaza del Hornado - mercado de paute - señora que vende el hornado - mujer que vende el hornado - llapingacho - that should do it)