Pique macho or Pique a lo macho (Meat & Vegetable Dish) is a typical Bolivian recipe. It is a heaping plate consisting of bite-sized pieces of beef and french fry-cut potatoes. Added to this mixture are onions, boiled egg, mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup.
This mountain of food is traditionally made spicy and if you can finish a plate of pique on your own, you are truly ‘macho’!
Pique Macho
Ingredients
- 2 lb beef loin
- 1 lb hotdogs sliced
- 8 medium potatoes cut into French fries
- 3 tbsp vegetable oil
- 4 large onions chopped
- 2 medium tomatoes peeled, seeded and diced
- 8 chili peppers diced
- 2 cloves garlic chopped
- 1 tsp cumin
- frying oil
- salt
- black pepper
- 4 hard-boiled eggs
Instructions
- In a pot, heat a large volume of oil at 350 F and add the potatoes. Fry for 8 minutes.
- Drain and set aside. Keep the cooking oil.
- Heat 5 tablespoons of the cooking oil in a pan and fry the hotdog slices for a few minutes. Drain and set aside.
- Cut the meat into small pieces and season with salt, garlic, black pepper and cumin. Mix well by hand to soak the seasoning.
- Heat 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a pan and fry the locotos for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the onion, tomato and a pinch of salt. Mix well.
- Add the meat and mix well.
- Heat the large volume of oil again to 375 F and fry the potatoes again for 3 minutes. Drain and season with salt immediately.
- Add the reserved sausages to the meat and mix everything.
- Serve with hard-boiled eggs.
- Garnish with strips of raw locotos, sliced raw tomatoes, mustard and mayonnaise.
The Legend
This dish was created by Mr. Honorato Quinones and his wife Evangelina Gomez Quinones, owners of “Restaurante Miraflores” in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
It’s a very simple recipe to prepare and perfect for when you have a lot of people, or you want a dish to share. If you don’t like spicy, you can obviously just omit the chili pepper, but then the dish loses all its character and becomes simply a beastly salchipapa. So I encourage you to put spice in your life!
As the legend goes, a group of workers, late at night, drunk, were hungry. The owner of the restaurant said they were closing and had nothing. The group of workers insisted that they would eat anything. The owner proceeded to chop what she had left of the ingredients that constitute this delicious meal and served them really spicy to help with their drunkenness. She then said “Piquen” si son “machos”, eat it if you think you’re man enough, and that is how it got the name of Pique Macho.
Recipe Roundup Weekly Newsletter
Signup to receive our new recipes every week. Every Monday we send out last week’s newly published recipes. Never miss a recipe from Hispanic Food Network.
