Colombian · Bread
Arepa de Choclo con Cuajada
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a sweet edge rounding the corners, melting away silken.
Ingredients
- 600 g fresh yellow corn kernels, from about 5 ears
- 50 g masarepa, precooked yellow corn flour
- 30 g butter, soft, plus more for the griddle
- 25 g panela, finely grated, or dark brown sugar
- 5 g salt
- 250 g cuajada or other fresh curd cheese, in thick slabs
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
ArepasSugar stages & caramelGriddle & plancha work
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Strip the kernels and blitz them with the salt and panela to a coarse, spoonable batter; stop while you can still feel whole grains between finger and thumb.
- Beat in the masarepa and the soft butter, then leave it 10 minutes; it should mound on the spoon and settle slowly rather than run off it. 10 min
- Butter a heavy pan over medium low heat and spread a heaped ladle to a disc about 12 cm across; the top loses its shine and the underside freckles dark gold in around 6 minutes. 6 min
- Turn once and cook until the second side is spotted and the centre springs back under a fingertip.
- Fold each hot cake around a slab of cuajada so the cheese slumps and softens without running out of the seam.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
Sugar stages & caramel 53 recipes
- Nothing is stirred once it is boiling, and any crystals clinging to the side of the pan are brushed down rather than left to fall in.
- Judged by temperature or by a tested stage rather than by time: consecutive stages are a few degrees apart and look identical in the pan.
- Colour is read off the heat and in good light, remembering that sugar keeps darkening after the flame is out.
- Stopped decisively at the point wanted: off the heat and into the next liquid or onto a cold surface, rather than left to coast in a hot pan.
- The result is clear and smooth rather than grainy, cloudy, or seized into a solid mass.
Where it goes wrong It was stirred after coming to the boil, or a stray crystal from the side of the pan fell back in. One crystal seeds the whole pan and the syrup turns grainy within seconds, and once sugar has crystallised the only cure is more water and starting the whole thing again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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