Volcanic Ecuador's ecosystems, with Juan Sebastián Pérez

“I'm surrounded by volcanoes where I live. Quito is the world's only capital city with two volcanoes within its city limits. One of them, Cotopaxi, erupted 30 years ago”. This was how Juan Sebastián Pérez (Quitu, Quito, Ecuador) began his talk at Worldcanic, along with three recipes and products to showcase four "fertile" ecosystems of the South American country, "a small, beautiful country, where you can have breakfast on the coast, lunch in the Andes, and dinner in the Amazon". 

After explaining all this, the chef demonstrated it on his sampling menu, which only features fair-trade community produce. "The words identity and sustainability are very important to me", he told the congress. And he provided some examples with the three recipes he had brought to Lanzarote. From the area around the Cayambe volcano, he produced a starter of tushpa "papa potatoes matured for 12 days (papa fritter), 60 days ("arrugada" papas) and 120 days ("llapingacho", our potato tortilla). The last-mentioned, he explained, "brings us closer to the earth. It means eating food with mineral origins".

From the inter-Andes valley he produced a "mashua" carpaccio - this is a tuber similar to carrot, with aniseed; from the Galapagos islands, "a 100% volcanic-origin ecosystem", fried octopus in lard, and, from the world's highest active volcano, Cotopaxi (meaning "moon neck"), a cocoa mousse from the Equatorial wetlands melted in Güiti mineral water from the Cotopaxi, the only product in Ecuador with a denomination of origin.

Juan Sebastián Pérez, who studied at Le Cordon Bleu and trained at a number of restaurants all over the world and went back to cook up Ecuador, finished off with a reminder of the positive effects of volcanoes, because "their ashes create a microclimate that retains moisture more easily, creating soil with minerals to produce an excellent taste in tubers and vegetables, for example".