Honduras: vegan sopa de caracol

This week, we’re back in Central America where we stop in Honduras to cook some vegan sopa de caracol with a vegan conch substitute. This Indigenous conch soup is based on coconut cream with sweet richness added by cassava and green banana. The resulting soup is rich, thick and sweet, and well worth trying. Read on to learn more about the dish or jump straight to the recipe.

Honduran cuisine

With strong influences from Central American, local Indigenous, Caribbean, West African, and Spanish cuisines, the Honduran kitchen boasts a captivating array of flavours and dishes ​[1]–[3]​. Familiar Central American ingredients and dishes like tortillas, bean tostadas, tamales, and pupusas (like those we enjoyed during our stop in neighbouring El Salvador) coexist with ingredients like plantains, cassava, seafood, and coconut milk which draw the mind to Caribbean fare.

Among the Honduran classics, standout dishes include baleadas, a soft taco with beans and cheese, and Honduran enchiladas served on a crispy, fried corn tortilla (similar to tostadas). Honduran pastelitos are savory dough pockets filled with meat, rice, and potatoes which bring the mind to empanadas. You will also find Spanish influences in the form of chorizos, torrejas, a variant of French toast, and rosquillas, lemon and anisette-infused donuts.

The Honduran culinary experience is further extended through Caribbean ingredients and dishes. Plantain, cassava, and coconut milk are integral components in various recipes and side dishes. Plantains add their unique twist to Honduran bean soup, or appear fried, either sliced as a side or whole and covered with beans and cheese.

With Honduras’ long Caribbean coastline, it is natural that seafood has a strong presence in the cuisine. particularly in a range of soups enriched with coconut milk and hearty starches like cassava, plantain, and yam. Classic soups include tapade de pescado, sopa marinera, and, the highlight of today – sopa de caracol.

Sopa de caracol

Sopa de caracol, or conch soup, is a popular Honduran dish originating from the Indigenous Garifuna people. The Garifuna are descendants of the Indigenous Arawak and Carib peoples of San Vincent and freed or escaped enslaved people from West Africa who made their way to the island from two wrecked Spanish slave ships and other Caribbean islands ​[4], [5]​. San Vincent remained unconquered by European colonizers until the very end of the 18th century. When the British eventually conquered the island, the Garifuna people were exiled to Honduras in Central America where they were given land by the Spanish.

Coming from an island and living on the coast, the Garifuna diet features plenty of seafood, including conch, a large sea snail. The tropical climate is also great for culturing bananas, coconuts, and cassava which are all important staples in the Garifuna kitchen. Sopa de caracol combines all of these ingredients into a single dish that has gained a lot of popularity in Honduras, also outside the Garifuna people.

A Hot Latin Hit

The popularity of sopa de caracol might be only partially be due to its rich flavour: the 1991 song sopa de caracol by Hondurian Garifuna Banda Blanca might have helped popularize the dish. With lyrics in Spanish and Garifuna, the song quickly reached international popularity and climbed to the number-one spot on Billboard’s list of Hot Latin Songs in the US ​[6]​. You can listen to the song on YouTube and the chorus goes something like this (translated from Spanish by ChatGPT) ​[7]​, with Garifuna interjections like “I want to eat soup” and “I want to keep enjoying it” ​[8]​.

With the waist, move it
With the hips, move it
If what you want is to dance
If what you want is to enjoy
If you want to order
Sopa de Caracol, Eh!

Banda Blanca

How to make sopa de caracol

The main ingredient in sopa de caracol is of course conch, a large sea snail. The rest of the soup is based on the starchy vegetables cassava and green banana or plantain which are simmered in coconut milk until they start to break apart, creating a creamy and sweet soup. The soup also includes flavour elements like green bell pepper, chilli, garlic, onion, and cilantro ​[9]–[16]​. Some recipes call for tomatoes ​[15], [16]​, carrots ​[14]​, or celery ​[13]​ and sometimes other spices like cumin or ginger. The conch is added to the soup at the very end of cooking to minimize its cooking time. The soup is traditionally served with rice ​[12], [16]​ but you can also serve it with fried plantain ​[12]​ or tortillas ​[11]​.

Many recipes also call for culantro, a herb that tastes similar to cilantro but looks very different (if it sounds familiar, it might be because we used it when we made doubles for Trinidad & Tobago, in one of the very first posts on the blog). This time, I did not find any culantro so will just use cilantro instead.

Annatto seeds are used to add a bit of colour to the otherwise pale soup. These seeds are the same small, red seeds we used to stain our hallacas when visiting Venezuela last year. For the hallacas, we prepared an annatto seed oil by heating the seeds in canola and then discarding them but you can also find ready-made annatto seed paste in some Latin stores. If you can’t find annatto seeds, you can add some fresh, diced tomatoes, tomato puree, or red bell pepper to the soup instead.

Vegan sopa de caracol

Creating a vegan sopa de caracol recipe only has one challenge but it is a tricky one. Not counting chicken stock, the soup only has one non-plant-based ingredient: the conch itself. So replacing the conch with a vegan substitute becomes the one and only challenge but it is a bit tricky.

Vegan conch substitute

Creating a vegan conch substitute is an important step of making vegan sopa de caracol. I did a bit of reading on this topic when we paid a virtual visit to the Bahamas and made conch salad. In conch salad, the conch is served fresh (making the dish a ceviche) and serving the conch fresh like that puts other constraints on the vegan conch substitute. For Bahamas, I ended up choosing fresh, young coconut – both for texture and a Bahamian touch – after discussing the topic with a friend from the island. During my reading for vegan conch salad, I came across a recipe by Korenn Rachelle that roasted king oyster mushrooms and then marinated them with seaweed ​[17]​ before serving them in vegan conch fritters. And this is what I decided to do as a vegan conch substitute in the vegan sopa de caracol.

Using king oyster mushrooms and seaweed as a vegan seafood substitute is a well-known trick. We used king oyster mushrooms to replace squid when making takoyaki for our trip to Japan, and king oyster mushrooms are a popular substitute for scallops ​[18]–[20]​ and fried shrimp ​[21], [22]​. Rachelle’s trick of baking them first before marinating them seems like an easy way to toughen up the texture a bit for a bit before marinating them overnight. As a bonus, baking the mushrooms removes liquid, leaving more space for the marinade.

Conclusion

This vegan sopa de caracol reminds me a lot of the oil down we made for Grenada but is at the same time very different. Simmering banana and cassava in coconut creates a thick, quite sweet soup with nice complexity from the flavour-bearing vegetables, herbs and spices. Not as complex as the oil down but much easier to make and to shop for, with the much-reduced ingredient list. Sadly, the vegan conch substitute did not augment the dish. It was alright to eat the mushrooms in the soup but leaving it out would not have diminished the vegan sopa de caracol.

The greenest banana I found was not quite as green as I would have wanted but it worked well anyway. I was afraid the final dish would taste like banana but it did not.

That’s it for our vegan world tour stop in Honduras. Join me again next time when we travel south into South America. If you don’t want to miss the next stop, you can subscribe to the email list and I’ll send you an alert when we arrive.

Vegan sopa de caracol

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Vegan sopa de caracol

Sopa de caracol is a classic Honduran soup made from coconut milk, cassava, and banana or plantain. In this vegan version, the conch is replaced by king oyster mushrooms marinated in seaweed broth.

Course Main Course

Cuisine carribbean, Central American

Keyword cassava, soup, vegan seafood

Prep Time 20 minutes minutes

Cook Time 45 minutes minutes

Marinade 12 hours hours

Servings 3 servings

Ingredients

• 2 cloves garlic
• ¼ onion
• ½ green chili optional
• ½ green bell pepper
• 250 g cassava uncooked cassava is poisonous
• 1 green banana or green plantain
• 5 sprigs cilantro
• 300 mL coconut milk
• 300 mL water
• 2 tsp vegetable stock powder or cube
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil e.g. canola
• 1 tsp annatto seeds or paste optional, see note
• 1 tsp cumin, ground
• salt & pepper, to taste

Conch substitute

• 200 g king oyster mushrooms 2 large mushrooms
• 1 piece kombu or nori, ~5 x 10 cm seaweed
• salt
• 500 mL water enough to cover the mushrooms

For serving

• rice, fried plantain, and/or tortillas

Instructions

Vegan conch substitute

• Turn on the oven and set to 200℃.
• For the vegan conch, remove the mushroom caps from the stems. Wrap steams whole in aluminum foil.
• Bake the aluminum foil-wrapped mushroom stems for 30-60 minutes at 200℃. Cooking time depends on the size of the mushrooms. They should be cooked through and start to brown a little.
• Bring water to a boil and add seaweed and salt. Let cool.
• When the mushrooms are done, let them cool. Cut the stems in a circular motion parallel to the stem. The goal is to create a single, large sheet from the stem.

Sopa de caracol

• If using annatto seeds to colour the soup, prepare some annatto seed oil by heating 2 tbsp canola and the seeds in a pot. When the oil is stained red, discard the seeds.

  To save dishes, you can do this in the same pot you will cook the soup in.
• Heat the canola (stained or not) in a pot. Add the chopped onion, garlic, bell pepper, and optional chili. Sweat on medium heat until the vegetables are cooked through and the onion is translucent.
• Stir in cilantro and cumin.
• Add water, coconut milk, salt, and vegetable stock powder/cube.
• Peel and chop the cassava. The peel can be removed using a knife to trace the inside of the thick peel.
• Peel and slice the banana.
• Add cassava and banana to the pot.
• Bring to a simmer and let the soup simmer for 30-45 minutes, until the cassava is cooked through.
• When the cassava is done, the banana should also be done. Add the vegan conch substitute and let it heat through. For extra seafood flavour, you can add some of the seaweed marinade.
• Serve the vegan sopa de caracol with rice, fired plantain or tortillas.

Notes

Annatto seeds are used to add some red colour to the soup. You can replace the annatto seeds with fresh tomatoes or a bit of tomato puree. This will change the flavour of the soup but some cooks do include tomatoes in their sopa de caracol.

References