Snacking State-by-State: Puerto Rico IV - If you like piña coladas, but don't like sitting through annoying easy listening songs.

Ah, the piña colada, that simple and sweet concoction of coconut cream, pineapple juice and (hopefully) Puerto Rican rum.  Many a piña colada has ended its life by a poolside bar or lounge chair.  Once I even had to get a dry one during a visit to Acapulco in 2000 - coinciding with the presidential election that year (it is illegal to sell alcohol in Mexico during election weekend. This is different than the US, where our elections might actually motivate us to drink more.)  And of course, the piña colada is not an Anglo creation, not a Mexican innovation, and not a Cuban concoction.  Esta es boricua, pa'que nosotros lo sepamos.

Official Name: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico)
Is it a state? Nope, it's a territory - the largest one in the United States
Official Languages: Spanish and English, with Spanish as the more widely spoken language
Territorial Nicknames: La Isla del Encanto (The Island of Enchantment); Borinquen (from the original Taíno name for the island, Borikén)
Cession to the US: December 10, 1898 (after winning autonomy from Spain on November 25, 1897)
Capital: San Juan (largest)
Other Important Cities: Bayamón (2nd largest), Carolina (3rd largest), Ponce (4th largest)
Region: Caribbean; South Atlantic (US Census)
Bordered by: the Caribbean Sea (all sides)
Closest land mass: Dominican Republic, a little more than 50 miles to the west
Official Territorial Foods and Edible Things: none
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Puerto Rican food (duh) - a mixture of Taíno, West African and Spanish influences, including: sofrito, tostones, arroz con habichuleas (con gandules around Christmas), mofongo, tembleque; ají dulce (sweet peppers indigenous to Puerto Rico); piña colada

As many a source says, the specific origin story of the piña colada is not certain, and there are a few narratives.  Nicholas Gill [2009] writing for the New World Review lists at least four different origin myths for the piña colada, including one that says the drink originated in the 19th century, another more popular one that gives the credit to Spanish ex-patriate Ricardo García who created it at the glamorous Caribe Hilton in San Juan in 1954, and yet another one that sets the creation of the drink in Buenos Aires (!) in 1963.  As Gill suggests, the most credible theory gives the cred to another employee of the Caribe Hilton, Ramon “Monchito” Marrero at the hotel's Beachcomber Bar, also in 1954.  At any rate, the legendary piña colada was almost certainly born in San Juan, and is an widely known drink throughout Puerto Rico, the United States and the world, even wending its way into the first #1 song of the 1980's, a song by Rupert Holmes that many a radio listener has tried to "Escape" before suffering it for too long.

The Recipe: Piña colada

The piña colada is not too difficult to make.  The International Bartender Association suggests one part white rum to one part cream of coconut to three parts of pineapple juice (3.0 cl to 3.0 cl to 9.0 cl respectively).  Most recipes, including the one I followed on the Goya website, say you need just the following:

* pineapple juice (this is a bit more expensive than I had expected, at about $2 a can)
* coconut cream (not coconut milk but cream, again not too cheap at about $3 a can)
* rum, preferably white rum, most preferably Puerto Rican rum (this smallish bottle of Bacardi Puerto Rican rum set me back about $7 at the Wine Source.  I didn't want a larger one because I don't drink many cocktails or liquors)
* ice (you will crush this)

You should typically have pineapple slices and maraschino cherries for garnish (one each per glass), but I'm not mass producing these things here.  I will go without all that "faincy" stuff.

Into a blender, throw in your ice.

Next, add the pineapple juice...

... the cream of coconut...

...and the rum.

Blend until smooth and serve.

Now this is a pleasant summer drink, and as warm as this past winter was, you just know we're going to need a few of these in what promises to be a subtropical sort of summer (90 degrees at the end of May?  In Baltimore!?  Well, a piña colada will help me cool down...

- - - - -

And we're done with the Isle of Enchantment.  We fly back from Puerto Rico (or a few hours up 95 if you're kickin' it Nuyorican style) to the teensiest state in the Union, where you will miss all the good Italian, Portuguese and hearty Yankee cooking if you blink en route between Connecticut and Massachusetts.  You've guessed it: next we're exploring Rhode Island.

Sources:

Deane, Zain.  "Mofongo".  Go Puerto Rico (GoPuertoRico.About.com), date unknown.  Copyright 2012, About.com, All rights reserved.

El Boricua (ElBoricua.com).  "Mofongo".  Date unknown.  Coyright 2012, El Boricua, All rights reserved.

Gill, Nicholas.  "The History of the Piña Colada".  New World Review, 2009.  Copyright 2009, New World Review, All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Piña Colada: How to Make Piña Colada".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Tembleque - Coconut Pudding: Quick, Coconut Gelatin".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

International Bartender Association. "Piña Colada".  Last accessed 2010 (archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Archive.org)

Rivera, Oswald.  Puerto Rican Cuisine in America: Nuyorican and Bodega Recipes.  Second edition.  Four Walls Eight Windows: New York, 2002.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Puerto Rico" and "Puerto Rican cuisine" pages and other pages.

Snacking State-by-State: Puerto Rico III - The wind that shakes the tembleque

Many of us have seen the pre-packaged boxes of Goya-brand tembleque in the "Latino foods" section of the supermarket.  I tried making  this coconut milk pudding once using one of these box mixes.  It didn't work out too well.  How could I have known just how much more successful it would be to make the damn thing from scratch?

Official Name: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico)

Is it a state? Nope, it's a territory - the largest one in the United States

Official Languages: Spanish and English, with Spanish as the more widely spoken language

Territorial Nicknames: La Isla del Encanto (The Island of Enchantment); Borinquen (from the original Taíno name for the island, Borikén)

Cession to the US: December 10, 1898 (after winning autonomy from Spain on November 25, 1897)

Capital: San Juan (largest)

Other Important Cities: Bayamón (2nd largest), Carolina (3rd largest), Ponce (4th largest)

Region: Caribbean; South Atlantic (US Census)

Bordered by: the Caribbean Sea (all sides)

Closest land mass: Dominican Republic, a little more than 50 miles to the west

Official Territorial Foods and Edible Things: none

Some Famous and Typical Foods: Puerto Rican food (duh) - a mixture of Taíno, West African and Spanish influences, including: sofrito, tostones, arroz con habichuleas (con gandules around Christmas), mofongo, tembleque; ají dulce (sweet peppers indigenous to Puerto Rico); piña colada

Let me qualify what I said above: making it from scratch scratch is not easy.  Oswald Rivera, author of Puerto Rican Cuisine in America does just that, taking several coconuts, draining the liquid and reserving it while shredding the meat from each one.  This is a tedious process, not to mention the fact that coconuts at the local supermarket cost about $2 a pop.  Plus I don't have the time or the patience to do this.  So what does the modern girl, er, guy do to make tembleque from scratch instead of using a box mix?  Simple: buy canned coconut milk and a bag of pre-shredded coconut, which probably most modern home cooks do anyway.

Just a quick note: though tembleque (literally, "trembling") is most common in Puerto Rico, a similar dessert is found in much of Latin America, as far as Brazil which has its manjar branco, as Wikipedia points out.  Typically it is served with cinnamon, cloves or toasted coconut on top.  The recipe I used, from the Goya website - yes, they have a scratch version, too - finishes it off with cinnamon and coconut.

The Recipe: Tembleque

For your surprisingly simple tembleque you will need the following:

* coconut milk (two cans - instead of the less expensive Thai or Vietnamese varieties, I did go with the Goya brand, and it cost me about $2 a can)
* sugar (had it)
* corn starch (had it too - you will need a good bit of this)
* salt (had it)
* ground cinnamon (had it)
* shredded coconut (about $2.50 a bag)

Empty your coconut milk into a medium saucepan.

Add to that your sugar and salt...

...and your cornstarch.

Stir constantly for about five minutes, until the cornstarch is completely broken up and the mixture becomes thick.

It will happen quite suddenly, and turn out like this.

Pour into a mold or into smaller ramekins - or one large pan (a bread loaf pan works in this case).

Place in the fridge for at least three hours, or up to a few days.

When you are ready to serve it up, quickly toast your shredded coconut in a pan.

Loosen the tembleque by running a knife around the sides of the mold, and turn over.

Dust with cinnamon.

Then place the coconut on top.

This is one of the more successful recipes I have tried out.  Not only was it firm and jiggly, wonderfully smooth and rich with coconut milk flavor, but it actually came out of the ramekin in one piece!  This sort of success never happens for me.  This is a simple and delicious dessert.  Don't bother with the coconuts, and for goodness sake don't get the box mix.  The coconut milk method is definitely the way to go.

Sources:

Deane, Zain.  "Mofongo".  Go Puerto Rico (GoPuertoRico.About.com), date unknown.  Copyright 2012, About.com, All rights reserved.

El Boricua (ElBoricua.com).  "Mofongo".  Date unknown.  Coyright 2012, El Boricua, All rights reserved.

Gill, Nicholas.  "The History of the Piña Colada".  New World Review, 2009.  Copyright 2009, New World Review, All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Piña Colada: How to Make Piña Colada".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Tembleque - Coconut Pudding: Quick, Coconut Gelatin".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

International Bartender Association. "Piña Colada".  Last accessed 2010 (archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Archive.org)

Rivera, Oswald.  Puerto Rican Cuisine in America: Nuyorican and Bodega Recipes.  Second edition.  Four Walls Eight Windows: New York, 2002.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Puerto Rico" and "Puerto Rican cuisine" pages and other pages.

Snacking State-by-State: Puerto Rico II - Just me and mofongo, paseando por la avenida...

As Zain Deane of About.com's Go Puerto Rico page notes, a person "can't walk into a self-respecting Puerto Rican restaurant and not see mofongo on the menu. It's a must-try for first-time visitors who want to claim to have sampled the local fare" [Deane, date unknown].  I've heard the word before, but not until this project did I ever realize just how delicious and how fattening mofongo really is.

Official Name: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico)

Is it a state? Nope, it's a territory - the largest one in the United States

Official Languages: Spanish and English, with Spanish as the more widely spoken language

Territorial Nicknames: La Isla del Encanto (The Island of Enchantment); Borinquen (from the original Taíno name for the island, Borikén)

Cession to the US: December 10, 1898 (after winning autonomy from Spain on November 25, 1897)

Capital: San Juan (largest)

Other Important Cities: Bayamón (2nd largest), Carolina (3rd largest), Ponce (4th largest)

Region: Caribbean; South Atlantic (US Census)

Bordered by: the Caribbean Sea (all sides)

Closest land mass: Dominican Republic, a little more than 50 miles to the west

Official Territorial Foods and Edible Things: none

Some Famous and Typical Foods: Puerto Rican food (duh) - a mixture of Taíno, West African and Spanish influences, including: sofrito, tostones, arroz con habichuleas (con gandules around Christmas), mofongo, tembleque; ají dulce (sweet peppers indigenous to Puerto Rico); piña colada

Mofongo is a mash of fried plantain, garlic and some sort of seafood or meat.  It is not just a Puerto Rican dish, but common throughout the Caribbean.  Puerto Rico's particular version typically features chicharrones (what we call pork rinds) or salt pork, though bacon is a common substitute in the US.  Oswald Rivera, author of Puerto Rican Cuisine in America, further points out that mofongo is formed into little balls or occasionally bigger ones (the Cuban way to serve it), and can be eaten either on its own or served with some sort of gravy or sauce.  Likely of African origin [Rivera 2002:12], it is a quintessentially Puerto Rican food.  He suggests that more modern versions may use seafood or beef.  Even vegans have tried to make a friendly version of mofongo using fried tempeh (the recipe from 2008 is on the Vegan Ricans website).

What I found while making the following mofongo recipe, which I got from the recipe section of ElBoricua.com and which suggests either chicharrón or bacon, is that if you don't already have tostones - twice-fried plantain chips - on hand, you have to first make tostones, which is not difficult but does get to be a little tedious if doing this on your own.  It is by far the longest part of this recipe.


The Recipe: Mofongo

To make mofongo you only need:

* plantains (the greener the better.  I did buy these at Wegman's for $1 per plantain.  They weren't terribly green though)
* garlic (had it.  This is added to the balls of mofongo raw)
* salt pork, chicharrones or bacon (bacon was what I had on hand.  The fatback I had from the previous recipe was a little difficult to cut into small pieces, and I admit I just gave up and switched to good old reliable bacon, which I had on hand.)
* olive oil (to mix in with the ingredients at the end)

You also need oil to fry up the tostones.  For this, I had a big jug of rice bran oil from that poutine recipe from that food truck in Oregon.

Render whatever pork product you have on hand.  I find the microwave to be the easiest: 2/3 of a package of bacon renders after about eight minutes - start for five minutes at 100%, then one to two minute bursts until crispy.  Most bacon microwavers collect the grease for easy collecting for future use, or - God forbid - disposal.)

Meanwhile, prepare your plantains, slicing them into chips for frying.

Fry until just soft, and drain.  You will need to do this in batches.

Next, bust out your tostonera (or if, like me, you don't have one, a flat-bottomed saucer) and lightly squoosh each plantain chip.  Every. Single. One.

Before frying again, dip each squooshed plantain chip in salted water.  Every. Single. One.  Fry again until crispy and set aside.  Here you could just stop and eat them all - tostones are usually eaten with a garlicky sauce or (a favorite for kids) ketchup.  But I've got mofongo to make, so I'm not stopping here.

Crumble up your bacon, chop up your garlic and add olive oil.

Next, take your freshly made tostones and pound them in a pilón (a wooden mortar typically found in the Caribbean).  My pilón is in the shop (that is, I haven't bought one), so I busted out my old trusty marble mortar and pestle to pound each tostón.  EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

This part isn't terribly difficult, but it is particularly messy.  You just have to deal with it.  Mix everything together and get ready to form them into small little mofongo balls (or a few larger ones).

El Boricua's recipe yields about three large mofongo balls.  The way I did it, I got about a dozen small ones.

This is my first experience with mofongo.  A few things: it is delicious: sweet sticky plantain, sharp raw garlic, and bacony bacony bacon all smooshed together?  Damn, what's not to like?  Well it is pretty fattening.  It wasn't particularly greasy, but with the olive oil it was still pretty fattening.  This is not something I would want to eat a lot of all at once.  I ate about five at once, and I felt a bit full afterwards.  This isn't health food here.  Probably the fattiness would be cut in a sauce or thick soup, which is how I probably would eat mofongo the next time.

Sources:

Deane, Zain.  "Mofongo".  Go Puerto Rico (GoPuertoRico.About.com), date unknown.  Copyright 2012, About.com, All rights reserved.

El Boricua (ElBoricua.com).  "Mofongo".  Date unknown.  Coyright 2012, El Boricua, All rights reserved.

Gill, Nicholas.  "The History of the Piña Colada".  New World Review, 2009.  Copyright 2009, New World Review, All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Piña Colada: How to Make Piña Colada".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Tembleque - Coconut Pudding: Quick, Coconut Gelatin".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

International Bartender Association. "Piña Colada".  Last accessed 2010 (archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Archive.org)

Rivera, Oswald.  Puerto Rican Cuisine in America: Nuyorican and Bodega Recipes.  Second edition.  Four Walls Eight Windows: New York, 2002.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Puerto Rico" and "Puerto Rican cuisine" pages and other pages.

Snacking State-by-State: Puerto Rico I - A few boricua staples in one!

Before heading up the 95 to the smallest state in the Union, I wanted to give a nod to the largest of US territories, a Caribbean island that has had much influence on the New York and nuyorican culinary landscape, as well as the American food frontier in general.

Official Name: Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico)
Is it a state? Nope, it's a territory - the largest one in the United States
Official Languages: Spanish and English, with Spanish as the more widely spoken language
Territorial Nicknames: La Isla del Encanto (The Island of Enchantment); Borinquen (from the original Taíno name for the island, Borikén)
Cession to the US: December 10, 1898 (after winning autonomy from Spain on November 25, 1897)
Capital: San Juan (largest)
Other Important Cities: Bayamón (2nd largest), Carolina (3rd largest), Ponce (4th largest)
Region: Caribbean; South Atlantic (US Census)
Bordered by: the Caribbean Sea (all sides)
Closest land mass: Dominican Republic, a little more than 50 miles to the west
Official Territorial Foods and Edible Things: none
Some Famous and Typical Foods: Puerto Rican food (duh) - a mixture of Taíno, West African and Spanish influences, including: sofrito, tostones, arroz con habichuleas (con gandules around Christmas), mofongo, tembleque; ají dulce (sweet peppers indigenous to Puerto Rico); piña colada

Puerto Rico is, of course, not the only territory of the United States: the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Marianas Islands also merit attention.  But Puerto Rico is the largest, the closest, and has the most citizens making regular trips back and forth to the mainland.  As such, it has has lots of influence on the American culinary landscape - specifically the Northeastern one, as New York City has the country's largest Puerto Rican population outside of, well, Puerto Rico itself. (NB: this is not meant to ignore other prominent Puerto Rican communities in the US, specifically in South Florida).

Puerto Rican cuisine's prominence on the New York culinary landscape is part of the larger Nuyorican community.  My guide book has been Puerto Rican Cuisine in America [2002] by Oswald Rivera, who writes certainly not the first Puerto Rican cookbook (perhaps the first Nuyorican one), but a very comprehensive one nonetheless.  Rivera helps to define Nuyorican culture and identity for his readers, including in food terms:

[A Nuyorican] partakes of a culture and enjoys a cuisine that combines elements of traditional Puerto Rican cooking with infusions of new ideas and new ways of doing things inspired by the new urban environment of New York. [Rivera 2002:ix]

In doing these next few Puerto Rico posts, I realize that they are not only an exploration of some of the isla del encanto's standard foods, but also a token nod back to New York and the Big Apple, which I already thoroughly covered a few months back.  Not to give all this extra attention to New York over and above all the other states here, but ignoring these strong Nuyorican elements makes little sense.

Whether the cuisine is puertorriqueño or neoyorquino, Rivera says there is no definitive way to describe it [2002:x].  "Our cuisine is a potpourri of various elements...[drawing] heavily on Spanish, native Caribbean and African influences.  It's heavy on spices, though Nuyorican cuisine has gotten somewhat milder..." [2002:x].  Among some of the most prominent features include fresh ingredients, pork and beef, and beans and rice - lots of beans and rice.  Of course, this last part is a staple throughout Latin America and the Caribbean: in Mexico it's arroz con frijoles, in Cuba it's either that or congri (if cooked together), in Peru it's fried like a pancake - this is called tacu tacu , and in Portuguese-speaking Brazil it's arroz com feijão.  It's important outside of Latin America too, whether it's Haiti's diri kole ak pwa or Louisiana's Cajun beans and rice (in the US, the beans come first for some reason; everywhere else, it's the rice that gets top billing).

In Puerto Rico and the Nuyorican world it's arroz con habichuelas - rice with red beans.  Rivera points out that during the holidays the beans may be pigeon peas instead (arroz con gandules), but rice with red kidney beans is the standard, and for this you typically prep the kidney beans first, in that other very important Puerto Rican ingredient, sofrito.  The sofrito is somewhat like the Cajun three sisters of onion, celery and green pepper: it is ubiquitous in many dishes.  Sofrito has more ingredients, but according to Rivera [2002:xii] it typically includes cilantro (often called culantro), green bell pepper, garlic, onion, recao and ají dulce.  These last two are probably quite easy to find in both Puerto Rico and New York.  They are not, however, so easy to find in Baltimore, so I had to find semi-reasonable substitutes.  Mind you: you can easily find Goya brand recaito and sofrito in a jar.  But to make the stuff from scratch you have to track down the originals.  Most of the Latin American groceries I've been to in Baltimore mostly carry Mexican and Central American ingredients.  I may be dense, but I haven't been able to locate Puerto Rican ají dulce, that small, sweet pepper common in Puerto Rican cooking.  Instead I opted for red bell pepper - not the same, but still a sweet pepper.  As far as recao, even Rivera suggests this is optional, and his uncle prefers to use regular old parsley (which is what I did).


The recipe: Arroz con habichuelas

There are a few steps here.  First I made the sofrito, then the habichuelas and finally the arroz con...

For the sofrito you will either need the jarred stuff - easier, probably not as good, but will more likely have the right ingredients in it - or if you do it from scratch (I did using the sofrito recipe on pages xii and xiii - it's that important - of Rivera's Puerto Rican Cuisine in America):
*cilantro (not difficult to find.  I had some left over from that Thai food truck recipe from Oregon)
* parsley (no recao on hand, but I have this on my porch)
* garlic (had it)
* yellow onion (same)
* green bell pepper (about $2 per lb, or about $1 for this one)
* ají dulce (as noted above, I had a bit of trouble tracking this down.  I substituted red bell pepper)

Most cooks also add tomato sauce, but usually hold off until the sofrito is in the pot with whatever it is cooking with.

For the beans (recipe on pages 201 and 202 of Rivera's book - I did use the sofrito method), you will need the sofrito along with:
* kidney beans (duh - beans are not as cheap as they used to be, but still at $1.50 for a pound they still aren't going to break me)
* tomato sauce ($1 for a can)
* oregano (had it, need more)
* salt (same)
* beef bouillon (yup, same)
* olive oil (again, had it)
* one potato (forgot to put it in the photo, but it is in the final product)

For the arroz con habichuelas (on pages 184 and 185 of Rivera's book) you will need the above red beans recipe along with some other ingredients I forgot to put in the above photo - not just more onion and green bell pepper, but also salt, pepper, oregano, olive oil and the following two important ingredients:

* rice (this really is becoming pricier.  I ended up buying the cheap 1 lb bag for about $1 at Wegman's)

* salt pork (the brand I typically buy has vanished from the supermarket shelves for some reason, so I bought Virginia fatback for about $2.30 per lb at Giant)

Start your prep the night before, rinsing the beans in a colander...

...and soaking them in cold water overnight.

The sofrito is not difficult to make: just chop up everything and throw it in your blender.

It will come out like this.

The next day, set your beans a boiling.

Add the sofrito, oregano, potato (peeled and cubed), bouillon, salt and pepper, and tomato sauce.

The author's mother also adds a little red wine - a tip from a Cuban friend of hers.  I went ahead and did this as well.  Boil (will take about 5 minutes), lower heat, cover and simmer for half an hour until thickened.

To continue with the arroz con habichuelas, reserve a few cups of the liquid from the beans to add to the rice.

Drain the rest and set aside.

Rinse the rice and set aside.

Render the salt pork with a little olive oil (I should have spent more time rendering, or just used bacon which renders much more quickly.  Also note: cubing fatback takes more effort than I realized).

Add the vegetables and saute for a few minutes, and then add the liquid, rice, beans and other ingredients.

Boil for five minutes until liquid is absorbed, then cover and simmer over low heat for another half an hour.  Again, it was starting to burn to the bottom at this point so I had to add more liquid (This always happens with this pot, no matter how faithfully I follow the recipe.  Note to self: maybe consider getting a new pot.)

In the end you will get this.  Yes, I added a red chile pepper for a little spice.

Here we are, a staple in lean times and good times.  The taste of the sofrito doesn't jump out at you - it's mild and it permeates the rice and beans.  This is filling, flavorful and just good.  And despite all the steps you have to take it really isn't that difficult to do.  Now this is going to inspire me to try rice with beans from other areas of Latin America.


Sources:

Deane, Zain.  "Mofongo".  Go Puerto Rico (GoPuertoRico.About.com), date unknown.  Copyright 2012, About.com, All rights reserved.

El Boricua (ElBoricua.com).  "Mofongo".  Date unknown.  Coyright 2012, El Boricua, All rights reserved.

Gill, Nicholas.  "The History of the Piña Colada".  New World Review, 2009.  Copyright 2009, New World Review, All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Piña Colada: How to Make Piña Colada".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

Goya.  "Tembleque - Coconut Pudding: Quick, Coconut Gelatin".  Date unknown.  Copyright 2012 Goya Foods, Inc., All rights reserved.

International Bartender Association. "Piña Colada".  Last accessed 2010 (archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Archive.org)

Rivera, Oswald.  Puerto Rican Cuisine in America: Nuyorican and Bodega Recipes.  Second edition.  Four Walls Eight Windows: New York, 2002.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Puerto Rico" and "Puerto Rican cuisine" pages and other pages.