The Surprising Culinary History of a Humble Puerto Rican Favorite

Aida Lugo McAllister still remembers the first time she tried Puerto Rico’s unofficial national dish.

“When I went to Puerto Rico, 1970, at age 17, that’s when I had my first mofongo. And it was heaven,” she remembers. “A mountain of this mashed plantain with pieces of pork in a sauce. Delicious.”

Mofongo is the first food people bring up when they talk about the island, says Lugo McAllister, a Puerto Rican home cook who has published recipes on her website Aida’s Kitchen and in her bilingual cookbook, Aida’s Kitchen a lo Boricua. A rich, starchy mash of fried green plantains, garlic, olive oil, and chicharrón (pork cracklings), it’s the perfect accompaniment to broths and stewed meats. Growing up in Gary, Indiana, Lugo McAllister and her family didn’t have ready access to green plantains, so she didn’t try mofongo until she moved to the island as a teen. But the dish’s impression on her was immediate.

“So delicious, so moist, and it came in a mortar,” she recalls. She has since published recipes for a “healthier” mofongo (sans pork cracklings) on her website and YouTube. Lugo McAllister is joined by influencers all over the internet who fry and mash plantains in wooden mortars. “When you think of Puerto Rican gastronomy, I’m sure that the first thing you think of is mofongo,” says the content creator Natalia Bercero on TikTok, before whipping up the dish for her fans.

Though it has contemporary appeal, mofongo’s roots are deep. The dish reflects the intertwined histories of African, European, and Indigenous people in Puerto Rico. Taíno people, native to the Caribbean islands, used a pilón, a wooden mortar and pestle, to grind ingredients together. Their civilization was flourishing before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492. Soon after, Spanish colonists attacked and enslaved the Taíno, putting them to work in gold mines and plantations. So many Taíno died under colonial rule that the Spanish brought enslaved West Africans to the island to replace their dwindling workforce.

In West Africa, cooks have long prepared fufu, a dish of plantains, yams, or cassava that is boiled, then mashed. Enslaved Africans brought that same technique to Puerto Rico. They also introduced plantains, which grew easily on the island and became “the main source of food for the slaves and the poor people,” said Lugo McAllister, who moved back from Puerto Rico to Indiana in her mid-20s.

Plantains are closely related to the banana, but in their green, unripe form, they’re not sweet, and can be used as a neutral starch similar to a potato. Over time, African cooks combined plantain-based fufu with European ingredients like garlic, oil, and chicharrón for flavor and moisture. The late food historian Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra wrote in Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity, that the word “mofongo” comes from an Angolan Kikongo term, “mfwenge-mfwenge,” which means “a great amount of anything at all.”

But that doesn’t mean mofongo is a breeze to make. “It’s a food that’s preferred eaten at a restaurant,” said Lugo McAllister. “Because of the many steps involved.” Even some restaurants avoid making the dish because of the amount of elbow grease involved in smashing plantains. Still, mofongo is a cornerstone of Puerto Rican gastronomy, and each restaurant prepares it in its own way. Some serve it in a pilón for extra flare. A main course is typically served on the side or in a well in the middle of the mound.

In Kissimmee, Florida, where more than half of the city’s 85,000 residents are of Puerto Rican descent, there’s no shortage of good mofongo. The chefs at El Cilantrillo, a Kissimmee restaurant known for delicious cooking, huge portions, and live music, prepare a particularly good one. “I will say that I’m a mofongos tester,” said Yannick Jordan, a Puerto Rican-raised project manager for the company of restaurants that includes El Cilantrillo. “El Cilantrillo’s is still my favorite mofongo that I have ever tried.” On the softer side, with a strong garlic flavor, their mofongo comes in a pilón bearing the restaurant’s name, and can be ordered stuffed with everything from octopus to Impossible Meat. It’s their best seller.

As with any great dish, mofongo has seen its fair share of spinoffs in recent years. Creative cooks in Puerto Rico and the mainland are trying their own takes on garlicky mashed plantains. There’s Lugo McAllister’s vegetarian mofongo, for example. For a festive appetizer, cooks shape smaller amounts of smashed plantains into little cups and fry them to make “mofonguitos” that they fill with meat.

El Cilantrillo is a purveyor of another mofongo innovation: trifongo, a mofongo made with a trifecta of green plantains, yuca (cassava), and maduros (ripe, sweet plantains). Lugo McAllister said that when she first experienced mofongo in the 1970s, trifongo was uncommon.

The yuca in trifongo is a mildly sweet, starchy tuber cultivated by the Taínos that is now a staple throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. El Cilantrillo’s trifongo contains no chicharrón, and gets some extra moisture and umami flavor from chicken broth and seasoning.

Lugo McAllister says that when it comes to making mofongo, the challenge is in getting the texture right. “It needs to be moist but not greasy,” she says.

Yuca and plantain are all somewhat dry once they’re mashed, so it’s the job of the cook to add fat and liquid to moisten them. “If you don’t put fat or some type of liquid, oh my god, you won’t be able to even swallow it,” Lugo McAllister warns. Traditionally, cooks would derive moisture from chicharrón, but many modern mofongos, like El Cilantrillo’s trifongo, are moistened with broth and olive oil. To prevent yourself from overdoing the fat, Lugo McAllister says to add it little by little, tasting to see when the texture is to your liking.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t a puree, but rather a mash with plenty of crispy chunks. Lugo McAllister recommends smashing the starches while they’re still hot from cooking, because they become much harder to manipulate once they cool down. If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, you can put the starches in a stainless steel bowl, cover them with a kitchen towel, and pound them with a mallet. Placing them in a plastic bag and smashing them with the flat bottom of a cup or a pan can work, too.

Lastly, there’s the flavor. Yuca and green plantain are pretty bland, so salt, garlic, and other seasonings are crucial. “It’s supposed to have a lot of garlic flavor,” Lugo McAllister said. Her healthy take on mofongo includes cilantro, and El Cilantrillo’s gets a flavor boost from adobo, a blend of salt and spices like garlic, pepper, oregano, and turmeric that many Puerto Rican cooks keep on hand. Some cooks make it at home, but it’s also available ready-made in supermarkets.

The adobo, plus the dance between green plantain, sweet plantain, and cassava makes El Cilantrillo’s trifongo anything but bland. The yuca and maduros add a dimension to mofongo that isn’t ordinarily there, Jordan said. “The cassava is more salty. Sweet plantain, of course, is sweeter. So it’s like an explosion in your mouth of these two different flavors.”