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Puerto Rican · Main

Arroz con Gandules

  • Intermediate
  • 30 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost

briny · tangy-ferment Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, ferment tang with real depth behind it.

Ingredients

  • 500 g medium-grain rice
  • 120 g sofrito
  • 100 g salt pork or cured cooking ham, in 5 mm dice
  • 60 ml achiote oil, made by warming 2 tbsp annatto seeds in 60 ml olive oil and straining
  • 400 g cooked gandules (pigeon peas), drained, their liquid kept
  • 120 ml tomato sauce
  • 50 g alcaparrado (green olives with capers)
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 2 tsp dried oregano, crumbled
  • 900 ml chicken stock combined with the reserved gandules liquid
  • 1 tsp fine salt, plus more to taste

The skills inside

Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs outFrying the paste until the oil splitsSalted water & the float testKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias

Allergen screen

None found among the 14 screened.

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

  1. Render the salt pork in a caldero over medium heat until the fat runs clear and the dice are gold at the edges.
  2. Add the achiote oil and the sofrito and cook, stirring, until the pan goes quiet and the smell turns sweet rather than raw, about 5 minutes; the water has to leave before the rice goes in. 5 min
  3. Stir in tomato sauce, alcaparrado, bay, oregano and gandules, then the dry rice, turning it in the fat until every grain is orange.
  4. Pour in the liquid, taste it for salt, and boil hard uncovered without stirring until the surface drops to the level of the rice and craters open across the top.
  5. Stir once from the bottom, level the surface, cover tightly and cook on the lowest heat for 20 minutes, then lift the lid; the grains should be tender and separate. 20 min
  6. Raise the heat to medium for 3 minutes without stirring, listening for a steady crackle, then rest off the heat 10 minutes and lift the pegao out in sheets. 3 min

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.

Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes

  • It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
  • The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
  • What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
  • There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
  • Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.

Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.

Frying the paste until the oil splits 95 recipes

  • It is being fried, not simmered: the paste is in fat over live heat and moving, holding a steady sizzle throughout rather than bubbling as a wet mass.
  • The colour has deepened and darkened from raw to cooked, and the volume has visibly reduced and tightened.
  • The split, the signal the whole technique is named for, is unmistakable when it comes: clear fat separates out and pools at the edges and on the surface, and the paste pulls away from the pan floor in one mass.
  • The smell has turned from sharp and raw to round and fragrant, with no raw bite left from any of the aromatics that went into it.
  • Nothing has caught: no black specks through the paste, no bitterness, and a pan floor that is browned but not burnt.

Where it goes wrong It was taken off as soon as it smelled good, before the fat separated; the raw edge of the aromatics is still in it, and the finished dish tastes thin and sharp no matter how long it simmers afterwards.

At the Table

The Pour
Riesling or Grenache
Also Right
Cru Beaujolais
From the Taps
Farmhouse saison
Zero-Proof
Cloudy apple juice, chilled

Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Arroz con Gandules Technique: Risotto methodThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Puerto Rican kitchen