K'alaphurka:

The Stone Soup of Potosí, Bolivia

epicurious.com

Today, the city's boomtown days are centuries past, and its population has shrunk while native miners work less glorious metals, like wolfram and tin, from the mountain's heart. At 13,000 feet above sea level, Potosí can still claim to be the world's highest city, and a visitor can get winded just strolling through the cobblestone streets, lined with Spanish colonial buildings painted mustard yellow, emerald green and aqua blue. At this altitude, even summer days can be bone-chilling, and it makes sense to start the day with a hearty breakfast. K'alaphurka, an odd  breakfast specialty of Potosí, must be among the world's heartiest.

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Visitors to Potosi, Bolivia may find it hard to imagine that the quiet, crumbling city high in the Andes was once the western hemisphere's largest metropolis. Built into the brown, barren slopes of Cerro Rico, the city has always been inextricable linked to the fortunes of that mountain, once fabulously rich in silver. The lode fueled the city's early growth, making Potosí one of the world's most populous cities in the 16th and 17th centuries, and its riches funded the Spanish empire.

K'alaphurka would be impossible for the uninitiated to find on their own, as it's only served in a handful of Potosí restaurants. Luckily, tourists only need to ask their cab driver for a ride to el palacio de k'alaphurka ("the k'alaphurka palace") and they'll soon find themselves at the doors of Restaurant Doña Eugenia, a small corner building across the street from a cemetery on the outskirts of town. On weekdays, Restaurant Doña Eugenia open early in the morning, and closes when they run out of the only two items on the menu: chunks of deep-fried pork called chicharrón, and k'alaphurka, a thick yellow soup made with dried white corn. In the kitchen, chef Eugenia de Arismendi fills handmade terracotta bowls with the soup, drizzles each with red chili oil and sprinkles them with crispy pork crackling. Just before the bowls are brought to the table, Mrs. de Arismendi adds the secret and indispensable ingredient: a rock.

This isn't just any rock. The rocks used in k'alaphurka are black igneous stones, about the size and shape of plums, heated to extreme temperatures in the coals of a fire. When the stone is dropped into the bowl, the soup almost explodes; it bubbles, hisses and seethes like a lake of molten lava. As the morning goes on, waitresses bring trays full of spitting, steaming, dangerously hot bowls of k'alaphurka to waiting diners.

When the soup calms down, one can start to eat with the oversized wooden spoons provided. The soup has the consistency of a thick chowder with a deep, earthy taste and, unlike many simpler Bolivian dishes, layers of heat provided by dried chiles. Mrs. de Arismendi claims that the rock, attributed with certain qualities both mineral and mystical, adds its own indefinable flavor. The word k'alaphurka comes from q'ala, which means "rock" in Aymara, an Amerindian language indigenous to the Bolivian Andes. Different versions (and different spellings) of the dish exist in other regions of Bolivia, as well as in Chile and Peru, but they're usually reserved for special occasions and feast days. But in the long shadow of Cerro Rico, the people of Potosí need the soup’s simple, restorative strength on a daily basis.

Restaurant Doña Eugenia

Avenida Santa Cruz (on the corner of Hermanos Ortega)

Potosí, Bolivia

Tel: 62-62247