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🌍 Country of the Week · A Spin the Globe Teacher's Guide
Puerto Rico
Puerto RicoNorth America · This week's dish comes from San Juan
About Puerto Rico
Puerto Rican cooking is built on sofrito and the starchy magic of mofongo (mashed fried plantain), plus slow-roast pork and rice with pigeon peas. Spanish, African, and Taíno roots define its bold, comforting plate.
What separates mofongo from West African fufu and from Dominican mangu is one step: the plantains are fried before they are mashed, not boiled, which is where the flavour comes from. Garlic and crackling go in as they are pounded in a wooden pilon, and the earliest written recipe appears in El Cocinero Puerto-Riqueno, the island's first cookbook, in 1859.
The sofrito here is recaito, and it is greener than the Cuban and Dominican versions because of the culantro and ajies dulces in it. Names matter too: pernil is the roast shoulder, while lechon asado is the whole pig turned over coals along the road to Guavate, and arroz con gandules uses pigeon peas rather than any bean.
The wider picture: A collision of Indigenous, colonial, and immigrant tables.
This week's dish: Pollo Guisado
Puerto Rican braised chicken stew: bone-in chicken simmered in a sofrito and tomato sauce with potatoes, carrots, and green olives, served over white rice.
Serves 6 · Prep 20 min · Cook 50 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 Puerto Rico 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. Pollo Guisado comes from San Juan, in Puerto Rico. 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 Pollo Guisado. How have the people, trade routes, and history of Puerto Rico shaped what ends up on the plate there?
4. Compare Pollo Guisado to a dish your own family cooks. What is similar, what is different, and what one question would you ask a family in Puerto Rico about how they make and share it?
5. After you cook Pollo Guisado, add Puerto Rico 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