Puerto Rican · Soup
Asopao de Pollo
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1 kg bone-in chicken thighs, skinned and cut through the bone in halves
- 2 tsp adobo seasoning of salt, garlic powder, oregano, pepper and turmeric
- 120 g sofrito
- 60 ml achiote oil
- 120 ml tomato sauce
- 50 g alcaparrado (green olives with capers)
- 300 g medium-grain rice
- 1.8 litres chicken stock
- 1 bay leaf
- 100 g green peas
- 1 roasted red pepper, in strips
- a handful of recao or cilantro leaves, to finish
The skills inside
Frying the paste until the oil splits
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
- Season the chicken with the adobo and leave it while you build the base.
- Warm the achiote oil in a caldero, add the sofrito and cook until it stops spitting water and smells sweet, then add the tomato sauce and alcaparrado and let the colour darken a shade.
- Add the chicken and bay, turn the pieces in the sauce for 5 minutes, pour in the stock and simmer until the meat is loose on the bone, about 25 minutes. 5 min
- Rain in the rice and cook at a lazy simmer, stirring every couple of minutes, until the grains are just tender but the pot still pours like thick soup, 18 to 20 minutes. 20 min
- Stir in the peas, scatter the pepper strips and recao on top, and carry it to the table at once with a jug of hot stock alongside.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
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
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chianti or Barbera
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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