Cuban · Main
Picadillo a la Habanera
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, acid holding everything up to the light, settling low and earthy.
Ingredients
- 700g coarsely ground beef chuck, about 20 percent fat
- 300g waxy potato, in 1cm dice
- 100ml olive oil
- 200g white onion, finely diced
- 150g green cubanelle pepper, finely diced
- 25g garlic, mashed
- 5g ground cumin
- 5g dried oregano
- 2 bay leaves
- 200g ripe tomato, grated
- 120ml vino seco
- 100g pitted green Spanish olives, halved
- 25g capers, rinsed
- 80g raisins
- 15ml white vinegar
- 10g salt
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outFrying the paste until the oil splitsKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
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
- Fry the diced potato in the olive oil until the edges are gold and the centres give, lift onto paper and salt lightly.
- Raise the heat, spread the beef in one flat layer in the same pan and leave it completely still until the underside has crusted and releases on its own; only then break it up and salt it.
- Push the meat aside, sweat the onion, pepper and garlic in the rendered fat until slumped, then stir the cumin and oregano into the hot fat until they smell toasted.
- Add the tomato, vino seco and bay and simmer until the fat rises and shines on the surface, then fold in the olives, capers and raisins and cook 10 minutes more. 10 min
- Off the heat, stir in the vinegar and return the potatoes; check the salt, aiming for a balance that lands savoury, then sweet, then sour.
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
- Cabernet Sauvignon or Malbec
- Also Right
- Tempranillo (Rioja Reserva)
- From the Taps
- Amber ale
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water, make room
Tannin binds to seared protein and fat: each bite softens the wine, each sip resets the palate: the steakhouse equation.
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