Before we get into Colombian food properly, I need to tell you something about hot dogs.

Because I thought I understood hot dogs.

I’m American. I grew up with hot dogs. I’ve grilled them, boiled them, burned them slightly on purpose, eaten them at baseball games, eaten them at cookouts, and eaten them in moments of life where a hot dog was not the best possible decision but was absolutely the decision being made.

So I believed — very confidently, very incorrectly — that the hot dog system was universal.

You open the package.

You cook the hot dog.

You eat the hot dog.

That’s it.

That’s the whole civilization.

What nobody told me before I moved to Colombia is that here, hot dogs often come individually wrapped.

Not the package.

Each hot dog.

Each one in its own little plastic casing like a tiny meat gift from a country that enjoys watching foreigners learn things the hard way.

And if you don’t realize that wrapper is there before cooking it, the experience goes in a very different direction than you intended.

That, to me, is actually the perfect introduction to Colombian food culture as an expat.

Not because Colombian food is bad. It isn’t. In fact, a lot of it is genuinely wonderful.

But because so much of it arrives with one specific pattern:

it’s not what you expected,

it often makes no sense at first,

and then five minutes later you’re either laughing, rethinking your life, or admitting that Colombia was right and you were wrong.

Usually all three.

So this is not a restaurant guide.

This is not “10 dishes to try in Bogotá.”

This is a field report from the kitchen.

The stuff that catches you off guard.

The food habits, packaging choices, ingredient combinations, and culinary plot twists that nobody really explains before you get here.

These are the ten Colombian food surprises that stop foreigners in their tracks.

Let’s stay with the hot dog for a second because it really is the perfect opening act.

In the U.S., hot dogs come in a pack.

A slightly annoying number of hot dogs that never matches the bun count, but still a pack.

In Colombia, many salchichas come individually wrapped inside the package, each one with its own clingy plastic outer layer that absolutely does not belong on the grill, in the pan, or in your mouth.

And here’s the problem:

the wrapper is subtle.

It doesn’t wave at you.

It doesn’t announce itself.

It doesn’t say, “Hey friend, remove me before heat enters the conversation.”

It just sits there quietly and lets you make mistakes.

This is one of those little Colombian food moments that feels almost designed to humble newcomers. Because once you know, it’s obvious. But until you know, you’re staring at a cooked hot dog wondering why reality feels slightly synthetic.

So yes, remove the wrapper first.

This is a public service announcement.

If the hot dog wrapper is the first small betrayal, the milk bag is the first major philosophical shift.

Because in Colombia, milk often comes in a bag.

Not a carton.

Not a plastic jug.

A bag.

A soft, floppy, structurally unserious bag of milk.

If you grew up in the U.S., milk exists in a container that understands the basic principles of stability. You open a cap, pour, close, done.

In Colombia, you cut the corner of the bag and pour from that.

That’s the system.

And once you cut it, the bag becomes an open object in your refrigerator unless you buy one of the special pitchers designed specifically to hold the milk bag upright, which is a hilarious and very Colombian solution to a problem that only exists because the milk was bagged in the first place.

So now your milk needs a support device.

Not because milk is fragile.

Because the packaging chose chaos.

And honestly, after a while, you stop questioning it.

That’s the strange part.

You adapt.

You start cutting the corner like a local.

Your standards shift.

And one day you realize you’ve accepted bagged milk as a perfectly normal part of life.

That’s how Colombia gets you.

Americans have a truly unexamined relationship with ice.

We assume it.

We demand it without thinking.

We treat automatic ice production as a birthright.

In the U.S., ice just appears.

Restaurants give you enough ice to alter the drink’s personality.

Homes have freezers that quietly manufacture it in the background like tiny frozen factories working around the clock.

In Colombia, ice is more intentional.

It exists, obviously.

But it is not always assumed in the same way.

Most homes don’t have an automatic ice maker.

Ice trays are more normal.

Restaurants may bring ice if you ask, but it can feel like a more deliberate resource than in the U.S., where drinks often arrive looking like someone froze half the cup on principle.

And yes, I have bought ice in Colombia that looked like someone had frozen water inside a plastic bottle mold and simply decided, “This is now a retail product.”

Which, to be fair, it was.

There is something oddly humbling about having your relationship to ice reclassified from “constant invisible luxury” to “thing you may need to plan for.”

It doesn’t ruin your life.

It just makes you aware of yourself.

Americans love bulk.

We have stores dedicated entirely to the emotional thrill of buying enough paper towels to survive geopolitical instability.

In Colombia, that energy is much less dominant.

A lot of life here is built around buying what you need, in the quantity you need, and then coming back later. It feels less warehouse-based and more rhythm-based.

Except for rice.

Rice is apparently exempt from all moderation.

Everything else can come in sensible amounts.

Soap? Fine.

Oil? Fine.

Daily groceries? Fine.

Rice?

Here’s a giant bag. Good luck.

And I respect it, honestly.

Because Colombian food made a decision a long time ago that rice is not a side issue. Rice is infrastructure. Rice is policy. Rice is one of the fixed pillars of civilization.

So yes, the country can be modest about quantity.

But when it comes to rice, Colombia has no interest in pretending restraint is a virtue.

I want to be fair here because not everything is confusing.

Some things are just better.

Avocados in Colombia are one of those things.

If you come from the U.S., you are used to avocados being expensive, unpredictable, and emotionally manipulative. They are either not ready, briefly ready, or spiritually dead by the time you remember them.

In Colombia, avocados are large, abundant, good, and often surprisingly cheap.

They don’t feel like luxury produce.

They feel like food.

That changes your relationship to them.

You stop making little internal budget calculations every time you buy one.

You stop treating avocado as a premium topping.

You just eat avocados because Colombia made the very reasonable decision that avocados should be accessible and enjoyable.

And after a while, the avocado situation back home starts to feel deeply unserious.

If you grew up in the U.S., your working idea of juice is probably narrow.

Orange juice.

Apple juice.

Cranberry if somebody is either sick, on a flight, or dealing with something they don’t want to explain.

Colombia does not respect this limited imagination.

Here, juice is a serious category.

A wide one.

A creative one.

You’ll meet fruits you’ve never heard of, never seen, and definitely never expected to be turned into fresh juice in front of you:

lulo,

maracuyá,

guanábana,

tomate de árbol,

feijoa,

and more.

And the wild part is not just that these juices exist.

It’s that they’re often made fresh, from real fruit, right there, as though this is the most normal thing in the world.

Then someone asks you:

con agua o con leche?

With water or with milk?

And suddenly you realize that Colombia has an entirely different theory of juice than the one you grew up with.

Some juices here are blended with milk.

And weirdly, some of them are excellent that way.

This is one of those moments where you stop saying, “That’s not how juice works,” and start saying, “Okay, explain the system to me again.”

Another thing Colombia does not need your permission for: seasoning fruit.

If you grew up in the U.S., fruit is mostly treated as sweet and innocent. You eat it plain, maybe chilled, maybe in a fruit salad if things get festive, but generally you don’t attack it with savory logic.

Colombia renegotiated that arrangement.

Here, mango with salt and lime is normal.

Sometimes chili too.

And the first time someone hands it to you, your brain may freeze for a second because you are looking at fruit that appears to have wandered into a different food category.

But once you try it, something deeply annoying happens:

it works.

The salt sharpens it.

The lime wakes it up.

The whole thing starts making sense in a way that feels almost offensive because now you have to admit Colombia saw a better version of the fruit and you didn’t.

That happens a lot here.

I really need to spend some time on soup because soup in Colombia is not “occasionally enjoyed in colder months.”

Soup here is serious.

Soup is cultural.

Soup is structural.

Soup is breakfast, lunch, identity, memory, and in some cases an outright challenge to your assumptions.

Let’s begin with changua.

Changua is a Bogotá breakfast soup made with milk, water, egg, bread, and scallions.

Yes, for breakfast.

Yes, with milk.

Yes, with bread floating in it.

And before you dismiss it, understand that people here talk about changua with real affection. Nostalgia. Warmth. Emotional sincerity. This is not novelty food. This is memory food.

Then there’s calentado, which is basically yesterday’s rice and beans reheated and eaten for breakfast. Not because someone was struggling. Because that was the plan. Because reheated leftovers in the morning are not an accident here. They are a respected breakfast logic.

And then we get to ajiaco, one of Bogotá’s signature dishes and one of the best soups I’ve ever had anywhere.

Chicken.

Corn.

Capers.

Cream.

An herb called guascas.

And three kinds of potatoes.

Three.

Not one potato in different shapes.

Three distinct potatoes in the same soup because Colombia looked at potatoes and decided abundance was the correct response.

It sounds excessive.

It is not excessive.

It is wonderful.

And then there’s the fruit-in-soup phenomenon — plantain or banana showing up in savory soups and stews. If you’re not from Latin America, this can create a small private moment of culinary confusion.

Then you taste it.

And once again, Colombia wins the argument.

This one may be the single best test of whether a foreigner is open-minded or just performatively adventurous.

In parts of Colombia, especially around Bogotá, hot chocolate is served with cheese.

Not beside it.

In it.

You get the hot chocolate.

You put the cheese into the hot chocolate.

It softens, melts, stretches a little, and becomes part of the experience.

The first time someone explains this to you, it sounds like either a joke or a misunderstanding that should be corrected gently.

It is neither.

It is called chocolate santafereño.

It is traditional.

And the infuriating thing is that it kind of works.

The salty richness of the cheese changes the chocolate in a way that shouldn’t make sense but does.

That may be the most Colombian culinary sentence possible:

It should not work. It works. You should try it anyway.

Finally, we need to talk about aguardiente.

Because if you spend enough time in Colombia, aguardiente is going to find you whether you were planning for it or not.

This is Colombia’s national spirit.

It’s usually made from sugar cane.

It has that unmistakable anise or black-licorice note that makes some people light up with joy and others feel like they have just licked a haunted candy cane.

But taste is only part of the story.

Aguardiente is social infrastructure.

Birthdays, parties, dinners, celebrations, holidays, regular Saturdays that somehow became more ambitious than expected — aguardiente appears.

And when it appears, it is usually not presented as a neutral individual choice. It is offered with the warm inevitability of a culture that believes gathering means participating.

So if you’re invited to drink aguardiente, understand that you are not just being handed alcohol.

You are being included.

That’s lovely.

It’s also dangerous on a weeknight.

Because aguardiente has no respect for your calendar, your responsibilities, or your planned 9 a.m. call the next morning.

Proceed with warmth.

And caution.

That’s Colombian food in a nutshell.

Not predictable.

Not boring.

Sometimes confusing.

Often funny.

And very frequently better than your first reaction allows for.

You’re going to stare at some things.

You’re going to question some combinations.

You’re going to have moments in kitchens, markets, and restaurants where your whole face says, “I’m sorry, what is happening here?”

That’s normal.

And then, little by little, Colombia starts winning you over.

The fruit makes sense.

The soup makes sense.

The cheese in the hot chocolate makes weird sense.

The juice becomes a category you miss when you leave.

Even the milk bag starts feeling less absurd and more like a strange little domestic fact of life.

That’s the thing about Colombian food.

It doesn’t always arrive in the shape you expect.

But it’s good.

Really good.

And if you give it a chance, it has a way of turning confusion into affection faster than you think.

Just take the wrapper off the hot dog first.