Andalusia · Main
Huevos a la Flamenca
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 4 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, aromatics blooming from the first bite, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 8 eggs
- 500 g ripe tomatoes, grated, or passata
- 1 onion, finely diced
- 1 red pepper, diced
- 3 garlic cloves, sliced
- 120 g jamón serrano, diced
- 100 g chorizo, in thin slices
- 150 g peas
- 150 g green beans, cut short and blanched
- 8 green asparagus spears, blanched
- 60 ml olive oil
- 5 g sweet pimentón
- salt
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedFrying the paste until the oil splitsBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: egg
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
- Fry the jamón and chorizo in the oil until the fat runs orange, lift them out, and soften the onion, pepper and garlic in that fat until slack and sweet.
- Off the heat stir in the pimentón, then the tomato, and cook it down until the sauce darkens and a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a track that stays open.
- Heat four earthenware cazuelas, divide the sofrito between them while it is still hot, and press two hollows into each with the back of a spoon.
- Crack an egg into each hollow, ring them with the peas, beans, asparagus, jamón and chorizo, and bake at 200C (390F) for 6 to 8 minutes. 8 min
- Pull them out while the whites are just opaque and the yolks still shiver; the earthenware finishes the cooking on the way to the table.
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.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
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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