Food & Drink

Argentine food is influenced by cuisine from Spain, Italy, Germany, France and other European countries, and many foods from those countries such as pasta, sausages and desserts are common in the nation's diet. Argentina has a wide variety of staple foods, which include empanadas, a stuffed pastry; locro, a mixture of corn, beans, meat, bacon, onion, and gourd; and chorizo, a meat-based spicy sausage.

The Argentine barbecue, asado, is one of the most famous in the world and includes various types of meats, among them chorizo, sweetbread, chitterlings, and blood sausage. Argentina is known for its asado of grilled beef. Meat (including entrails) is placed on the grill and cooked from below with natural wood and coal. There are restaurants that serve asado only; a good local restaurant always has a place set up to prepare asado.

Traditional foods of the provinces, such as locro, hark back to the pre-Columbian period, with a reliance on maize, beans and squash. Another traditional food is the empanada, a circular piece of pastry folded in two around a filling (including chopped meat, olives, hard-boiled egg, potato cubes, raisins, ham and cheese, and many other variants), which can be baked or fried.

Sweets, especially dulce de leche, are popular. Dulce de leche (a dark brown caramel paste, made from milk and sugar stirred at very high temperatures) is an essential ingredient of cakes, and shares the place of jam in breakfasts. It is also used to top desserts and to fill alfajores (two round biscuits, often flavoured, optionally coated with chocolate) and facturas (sweet baked pastry, such as croissants and donuts).

Argentina is famous for its wine, most notably the red wine from the province of Mendoza, where weather conditions (dry, warm summers) are optimal. You can find out more about Argentine wine in the extensive Wine Resource Centre.