Cuban · Side
Moros y Cristianos
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, an earthy, grounding base, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 300g dried black beans, soaked overnight
- 1.8 litres water
- 400g long grain white rice
- 100g tocino or slab bacon, in 5mm dice
- 60ml olive oil
- 180g white onion, finely diced
- 150g green cubanelle pepper, finely diced
- 30g garlic (about 9 cloves), mashed
- 5g ground cumin
- 5g dried oregano
- 3 bay leaves
- 60ml vino seco
- 12g salt
- 5g sugar
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outFrying the paste until the oil splitsSalted water & the float testSoaking dried goods back to life
Allergen screen
Found: alcohol
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
- Simmer the soaked beans in the water with one bay leaf until tender but still whole, then measure out 800ml of the black cooking liquor and keep the beans separately.
- Render the tocino in the olive oil over medium heat until the fat runs and the dice are amber, then sweat the onion, pepper and garlic in that fat until slumped and sweet; stir in the cumin and oregano.
- Rinse the rice under cold water until the water runs almost clear, drain it well, then stir it through the sofrito until every grain is filmed in fat and has turned chalky opaque.
- Pour in the 800ml of liquor with the vino seco, beans, bay, salt and sugar; taste the liquid and pull it a shade saltier than you want the finished rice.
- Boil hard and uncovered until craters open on the surface and the liquid drops level with the rice, then clamp on a lid, drop to the lowest heat for 18 minutes, and rest 10 minutes off the heat before forking it up from the edges. 18 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.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through 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.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Albariño or Muscadet
- Also Right
- Assyrtiko or Vermentino
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
The Atlantic’s whites beside the sea’s own liquor: salinity in sympathy, acid keeping everything bright.
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