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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Panama
PanamaNorth America · This week's dish comes from Panama City
About Panama
Panama's cuisine reflects its crossroads geography, sancocho chicken soup, rice dishes, and fried corn tortillas, with Afro-Caribbean coconut cooking on the coast. Plantain, root vegetables, and seafood anchor the plate.
Panamanian sancocho is specific rather than generic: hen simmered long with name, a yam, and a great deal of culantro, which is the broad-leafed relative of coriander and not the same herb. Yuca, otoe and corn often join it. The dish is credited to the Azuero Peninsula, the country's cultural heartland, rather than to the capital.
The tortilla here is not the Mexican kind. It is thick, made of ground corn, and fried rather than griddled, coming out puffed and crisp at the edges to be eaten at breakfast with cheese. On the Caribbean side, in Bocas del Toro and Colon, the cooking turns Afro-Caribbean, with coconut milk in the rice and in the fish.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Tortilla Panameña con Queso
A thick, crisp-fried corn cake, not a thin tortilla at all, split hot and stuffed with melting white cheese, a staple Panamanian breakfast.
Serves 4 · Prep 10 min · Cook 15 min · Difficulty: easy
See the full recipe: ingredients, steps and dietary swaps →
Grown-up jobs: any step that uses a hot stove, oven, boiling water, or a sharp knife is for a teacher or parent. Children can measure, mix, and assemble.
Discussion prompts
1. Find Panama on a world map or globe. It sits in North America. Which oceans or neighboring countries does it touch, and roughly how far is it from where you live?
2. Tortilla Panameña con Queso comes from Panama City, in Panama. Read its ingredient list together. Which of those foods do you think are grown or raised nearby, and how might the country's climate and landscape explain that?
3. Read the short story behind Tortilla Panameña con Queso. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Panama shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Tortilla Panameña con Queso to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Panama about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Tortilla Panameña con Queso, add Panama to a classroom map and give it a stamp. Write down one fact about its food or geography that you did not know this morning.
🌍 Spin the Globe · Geography through food · spintheglobeofficial.com/for-teachers