Christmas Soup Inspired by Bolivian Picana

This Bolivian inspired soup is a delicious, hearty meal for anytime. In Bolivia, it is a traditional soup to make for Christmas Eve dinner to celebrate Nochebuena. Bolivian Picana might be one of the first Bolivian dishes I cooked at home.

My husband is from Bolivia but we live in Miami, FL. Often times I try to make Bolivian inspired food for our family. I can’t always find all the ingredients as in Bolivia, but I come pretty close. Hope you enjoy this recipe:)

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What is Bolivian Picana?

Bolivian Picana is a slow cooked soup with a variety of meats, vegetables and even beer/wine to make the best Christmas Eve stew. Different regions in the Bolivia have slightly different recipes for this soup. Picana also has a special type of potato, which is called Tunta.

What is Tunta?

Tunta or white chuño is a freeze dried potato in the Andean region of Latin America, mainly Bolivia and Peru. The potatoes go through a process of natural freeze drying for several days in high altitudes, where it is freezing at night and warmer during the day which allows for dehydration to take place. White chuño or tunta is obtained by washing the freeze dried potatoes.

In Miami you can find tunta or chuño in some Peruvian stores. Latin American section in my grocery store doesn’t have this product. It’s not an easy product to find. If you can’t find it, I would add more potatoes to the soup.

Christmas Soup (Bolivian Picana) Recipe Notes & Tips

I have cooked this stew so many times and with slightly different versions each time. This is how I cook it in Miami because I can’t really find some ingredients like I would be able to in Bolivia. So this recipe is the closest I can get to the recipes handed over to me from my husband’s family.

• Give yourself time to cook this soup. It is rich in ingredients and some of them have to cook separately.
• That said, you don’t need to slave all day in the kitchen. Use Instant Pot or a pressure cooker and extra pots to cook some ingredients simultaneously. This will help shorten the cooking time.
• For example: I start cooking the beef in Instant Pot, then put the chicken in a pot to boil. While both chicken and beef are cooking, start peeling, chopping and cutting the vegetables. Start sauteing them one by one. At that point meat is cooked in IP, so you can naturally release the steam then add meat to the pot where you are sauteing the vegetables and take it from there. This step helps ensure that you cut down on time by overlapping some prepping steps.
• Several Bolivian recipes call for lamb meat too, so the soup usually has 3 different meats: beef, chicken and lamb. I love it with all 3 but my husband is not a big fan of lamb, so this time I didn’t include lamb. If you were to add lamb to this stew, cook it separately like the beef and chicken and put everything together after sauteing.
• Soup calls for both beer and wine as ingredients. I have tried the soup with red wine and white wine, I personally prefer it with white wine but you might want to try it both ways and see which one you like yourself.

I took some process pictures as I was cooking the soup, just to clarify some of the recipe steps.

Let’s start by putting all the ingredients together just as a big picture. If you’ll do this, keep them a bit more spaced out. I had to squeeze them together just for the picture purpose. Picture is missing olive oil and tunta.

Proceed by handling the chicken first, add it to a big pot, cover it with water and set it on the stovetop in high heat until it boils, then lower heat and cover the pot.

Then cut the beef in big chunks, saute in olive oil in the Instant Pot then add 3 cups of water to Instant Pot, set it to meat/poultry setting, close the lid and cook for 30 minutes.

Once beef is cooking in IP and chicken in the pot, clean and chop all vegetables as instructed in the recipe card below. Pick the biggest pot of all. Saute the onion in olive oil, then add carrots, red bell pepper, jalapeno and turnip to the pot. Saute all together.

Once beef has finished cooking in Instant Pot, let the IP depressurize naturally, then transfer the beef to the soup pot. Drain the stock through a fine mesh and add the stock to the pot as well.

Finally add seasonings, mix well. Then get the chicken, cut it in small pieces (portion sizes) and add to the soup. Add slowly some chicken stock to fill the pot up (few inches from the rim). Let cook for about another hour or so, then add beer and wine. Cook for a bit longer to let the alcohol evaporate and the flavors really meld together.

Boil the potatoes, tunta and corn separately. Add to plate as needed then pour soup with a ladle on top. Decorate with parsley and serve hot. Tunta when bought in Bolivia is processed like a potato, you usually boil it. The one I was able to find here in Miami, it’s canned and didn’t need additional boiling.

Cooking Tip: If you plan for no leftovers, cook the potatoes in the pot with everything else. But if you think you’ll have lots of leftovers, it’s better the cook the potatoes separately and just add them to plate as needed. Their taste tends to get bitter if they’re not freshly cooked, so it might make your leftovers taste different.

I love this stew so much but can’t prepare it often because it is time consuming so I plan for lots of leftovers. We freeze some in air tight containers. When I plan to use the stew again, I thaw it first then warm it up on the stovetop. I then boil corn and potatoes separately to add to plate.

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Other Bolivian Inspired Recipes

Please see below some more Bolivian inspired recipes:

• Silpancho
• Majadito
• Picante de Pollo (chicken in spicy sauce)