Food & Drink

The Foundation

A cuisine built on corn

Before anything else, understand the tortilla. The Panamanian tortilla is nothing like its thin Mexican cousin: it's a thick, dense disc of ground corn, either griddle-fried (tortilla frita) or — the interior's specialty — roasted over coals as a tortilla asada or changa, smoky and chewy, eaten hot with white farm cheese (queso fresco) and coffee. In the countryside around Loma Ranchito, corn is still often ground at home, and a proper breakfast is tortilla, cheese, and a fried egg — fuel for a morning of farm work.

Corn shows up everywhere else too: in almojábanos (S-shaped fried corn fritters, often with cheese), bollos (seasoned corn dough boiled in husks or leaves), tamales (filled with stewed chicken or pork), and the drinks and sweets below.

The dishes to know

• Sancocho de gallina — Panama's national soup and Azuero's great cure-all: free-range hen simmered with ñame (a starchy tuber), culantro, and not much else. The interior's versions are famously the best; it appears at every festival, wake, and hangover.
• Ropa vieja — shredded beef stewed with tomato, peppers, and onion, served over rice. Everyday fonda food done right.
• Arroz con pollo — the party rice, tinted and stirred through with seasoned chicken; no baptism or birthday happens without it.
• Guacho — a soupy, comforting rice often cooked with beans or seafood, somewhere between risotto and stew.
• Carimañolas & hojaldres — breakfast fry-stand classics: yuca fritters stuffed with meat, and puffy fried dough eaten with cheese or sausage.
• Queso fresco & cuajada — the highland districts produce farm cheeses sold from kitchen windows; ask around in any hill town.

Sweets & cool things

• Chicheme — Chitré's signature: a thick, sweet drink of tender corn, milk, cinnamon, and vanilla. The town's chicheme spots are local institutions.
• Raspao — shaved ice drenched in fruit syrup and condensed milk, sold from pushcarts on every plaza. The antidote to Azuero heat.
• Pesada de nance — a pudding-like sweet made from the tart yellow nance fruit; deeply traditional, slightly divisive, worth trying once.
• Manjar blanco & huevitos de leche — milk-caramel sweets that show up at fairs and festival stalls across the peninsula.

What to drink

Seco Herrerano is the national spirit — a clear sugarcane liquor distilled in Pesé, right in Herrera Province, since 1936. Locals drink it with milk (seco con leche, more appealing than it sounds), with soda, or straight at festival time. Chicha is the umbrella word for fresh fruit drinks — tamarind, passionfruit, mango — while chicha fuerte is the countryside's lightly fermented corn brew. Coffee is grown in the western highlands and drunk sweet, black, and often; and Panama's lagers (Atlas, Balboa, Panamá) arrive ice-cold everywhere.

Food is inseparable from the festival calendar — sancocho at the fiesta, tamales at Christmas, fish in Semana Santa. To time a trip around the table, see the festival guide.