Adventures in Grocery Shopping

Confession time. Before coming to Chile, I had this romantic idea in my head that there would be lots of small shops selling very specialized supplies – like vegetables, fruit, meat, etc. But there wouldn’t be anything resembling a supermarket like those in the United States. I envisioned doing all of my shopping by going to each of these individual shops almost every day. I also envisioned having to completely switch up my cooking to accommodate the foods and spices that I could find. Essentially, our diet would become entirely Chilean (or, Chileno, as they call themselves here).

All of that might have been true if we’d moved to Chile in the 1980’s or even the early 2000’s. But it’s not so true now. Yes, there are still small local stores (almacénes) on every third or fourth street. There’s one almost across the street from our house where you can buy fresh fruits and vegetables as well as a few staples. You can also get delicious fresh empanadas, pastel de choclo and humitas there! Yes, you can go to specialty shops for sewing supplies, hardware supplies, meat, fish, etc. And, yes, there are some foods that I haven’t been able to find no matter how hard I try. (Grape Nuts! Triscuits!)

But there are definitely supermarkets here. And something resembling Home Depot. And something resembling Walmart (in fact, owned by Walmart). The available items come and go quite rapidly, but I’ve been able to find many of the items I need, or a fairly decent facsimile of them. So, for the most part, I’ve been able to recreate most of my favorite recipes. However, there are some noted differences between groceries here and in the US.

The first few times we went to Jumbo, the largest supermercado in La Serena, it took us about 2 hours each time to find the few items we needed. We had to translate the packages to see what they were. And trying to ask for help was awful. As we quickly learned, we had enough Spanish to ask the question, but not enough to understand the answer – in Chileno, super fast, behind a mask! Eventually we just randomly grabbed things that we could recognize without taking time to look for the best quality, the best price, organic, low fat, etc. Just figuring out what they had and how they organized it was exhausting.

I knew before arriving that milk isn’t found in the refrigerated section. Just like in Europe, milk comes in tetra packs and is stored unrefrigerated. However, what I didn’t know was that you needed to weigh your fruits and vegetables in the produce section and get a sticker for it before going to the checkout line. Or how to actually check out at the counter (Sin cuotas? Con cuotas? What?) Or that Chileans are apparently obsessed with sugar.

Granted I haven’t eaten a kids cereal in the US for at least 30 years, but everything here is extremely sweet. There are practically zero unsweetened cereals here. There are cereals with artificial sweeteners, but they are just as sweet as the ones with sugar. Fortunately, I found a way to get US-made Multigrain Cheerios, which while slightly sweetened, are no way near as sweet as anything here, including Chilean-made Multigrain Cheerios!

Chileans are also apparently obsessed with mayonnaise. They put it on everything, including hot dogs. The Completo is a very popular dish here. It’s a hot dog covered in tomatoes, avocados, lots of mayonnaise, and possibly sauerkraut and ketchup.) Unfortunately, mayonnaise in Chile is also much sweeter than mayonnaise in the US. For those of you who have eaten my deviled eggs, suffice it to say that here, they taste awful!

Along with the supermercados and almacénes, there are also ferias and pescaderías. Ferias are essentially weekly or biweekly farmers markets. There are two main ferias in La Serena. One downtown (Feria de Abastos) that runs on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday. And another (Feria Vintage) higher up the hill toward where we live that runs on Saturdays. We’ve been to both and, personally, I prefer the one nearer to us. It’s about 1.5 miles away, so we can walk to it in half an hour. We’ve become very Chileno because we purchased the ubiquitous carrito (grocery cart) to haul our groceries back up the hill to our house.

The fruits and vegetables at both ferias are gorgeous and super cheap. We can purchase two large beautiful heads of leaf lettuce for about $1.25 and an entire carrito full of fruits and vegetables for under $30. So far, I’ve made two delicious batches of bruschetta, each for much less than in the US and with much tastier ingredients. Served on top of toasted caliza bread and you’ve got a fantastic lunch!

We’ve also gone to two different pescaderías (fish markets), or more accurately, mercados de mariscos (seafood markets). The most popular fish are pescada (merzula), reineta (pomfret), jurel (jack mackerel), salmon & rainbow trout (both farmed in Chile), and congrio (conger eel). So far, we’ve tried reineta and congrio along with another less common fish called palometa (pompano). I particularly liked the reineta, which had a nice mild flavor and firm texture (your basic white fish that can be used for everything), and the palometa, which reminded me of tuna in both consistency and taste. I’m sorry to say the congrio wasn’t a winner for me. Taste-wise it was very good, with a nice mild flavor. However, it was a very wet fish whose texture didn’t appeal. Apparently, you’re supposed to put it in soups rather than pan fry it. There are also lots of seafoods that are popular here, including abalone, razor clams, shrimp and crabs. Perhaps next time I’ll buy some of those.

So, needless to say, my romantic notions of grocery shopping and becoming a master at cooking Chilean food was pretty far fetched. But, between neighbors who feed us traditional Chilean foods, the shop down the street, and all the nearby restaurants, I think we’re doing a pretty good job of mixing the local foods with our well-known (and comforting) recipes.