Guatemalan Topado Soup: Don't Try This At Home

So about a month ago, Han and I took a post-holidays "vacation from your vacation" cruise through the Western Caribbean. One of our favorite stops was at Santo Tomas de Castilla in Guatemala. There we took a boat trip down the Rio Dulce and stopped at the small town of Livingston.

Unknown to us at the time, Livingston is famous for two things: catering to tourists from cruise ships from all over the world, and a special seafood soup called topado.

Our tour guide took us through the town and stopped for lunch at one of the restaurants off the main road in town. Being a river town, there were all sorts of seafood dishes available plus some of the more common dishes you'd come to expect. We knew we at least wanted the conch ceviche, but when we asked our server to recommend their best dish she said we had to try the topado, as it was the local specialty of Livingston.

The soup features this red creamy base with giant pieces of crab and fried fish and pieces of plantain. It was very flavorful and the meats were delectable. I seriously couldn't get enough of it. Once we left the restaurant and continued to walk around the town, we noticed that a lot of the restaurants also had signs that said "Try our Topado!"

Anyways, when we got home, being the daring amateur cooks that we are, tried to find a recipe on the internet to replicate the topado soup. The closest thing we could find was on Recipezaar so we gave it a shot. Unfortunately, as you'll see later, we didn't have a whole lot of success.

Ingredients:
-2 cups coconut milk
-1 onion
-1 red bell pepper
-2 lbs red snapper (we used tilapia)
-1 lb shrimp
-1 Tbsp corn oil
-1 Tsp oregano

-1/2 Tsp salt

-1/4 tsp fresh ground pepper

-1 plantain

-1 medium tomato

-3 tsp freshly chopped cilantro

-2 cups water

Now, the directions get a little hazy here. I'll post what we did:

-Slice the onion and saute in the corn oil.

-Add the coconut milk and spices and simmer for about 5 minutes

-Add the fish and shrimp in whole and simmer for another 10 minutes or until cooked

-Slice the plantain and dice the tomato and add to the soup and simmer for another 5 minutes

Here was the resulting dish:

Now, it doesn't look TOO bad, but it did not look anything like the soup we had in Guatemala, and it sure as heck didn't taste anything like it either.

I can tell you first and foremost that adding the fish in whole was a mistake. The soup we had in Guatemala was fried first, which in hindsight was key. The recipe we used said to dice the fish into 2" cubes, which probably would have turned out better as well.

Also the soup we had in Guatemala, not only more flavorful, was also much more, um, redder. Not really sure what happened there but I'm guessing it had something to do with stewing the red peppers or tomatoes?

So now we are reaching out to all of you, our loyal readers. Where did we go wrong? What could we have done instead? Does anyone actually have a real topado recipe they can share with us?

We welcome all suggestions!