Ajiaco

Take a large stockpot over medium heat and add red potatoes, golden potatoes, fingerling potatoes, carrots, garlic, onion, and chili pepper into the pot. Mix around for 5 minutes to warm vegetables up and enliven flavors, occasionally adding olive oil.

After 5 minutes, add vegetable broth to soup, ideally submerging all ingredients into broth. Bring broth to a boil before lowering heat to medium-low. Let soup simmer for roughly 20 minutes.

At the 20-minute mark, start to push some of the potatoes against the edges of the stockpot in order to break them up. This will thicken the soup. After mashing some potatoes, add guascas and stir thoroughly into soup. Continue to let soup simmer for another 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, add ears of corn and scallions. Mash up a few more potatoes if you can, and let the entire ajiaco simmer for another 15 minutes.

As the soup simmers in the final 15 minutes, begin to prepare garnishes. If making the modified salsa verde, prepare that first in order to let the flavors mix together. After garnishes are ready and the soup is done simmering, take off heat and serve with garnishes and salsa.

For the modified salsa verde, simply mix all salsa ingredients together.

Recipe adapted and translated from My Colombian Recipes and Historia Cocina