Soup & Stew Atlas · Soup
Sancocho de Siete Carnes
- Intermediate
- 3 h
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with wood-smoke running underneath, acid holding everything up to the light, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- A parade of meats, pick at least three (the Dominican grand version uses seven): beef shank, pork shoulder, chicken thighs, smoked bones, longaniza
- The root cellar: yuca, ñame or taro, green plantain AND ripe plantain, corn cobs in rounds, auyama (kabocha-style squash)
- Sofrito: onion, garlic, bell pepper, cilantro, oregano; a spoon of bitter orange or lime
- 2.5L water or light stock; salt in stages
- White rice, avocado slices and hot sauce alongside: the mandatory trinity
The skills inside
Frying the paste until the oil splits
The words inside
Kabocha SquashShank, Oxtail & CheekMirepoix, Trinity, Sofrito & FriendsAcorn Squash
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 meats with the sofrito; brown the sturdiest ones; add water and simmer the toughest first, adding the rest by tenderness rank over the first hour.
- Roots in by hardness: yuca and ñame first, plantains and corn next, squash last.
- Simmer until the squash and some yuca dissolve, thickening the broth to a rich gold: 45 min more; adjust salt and acid. 45 min
- Serve in deep bowls: broth, meats and roots together, rice and avocado on the side, each eater composing bites of soup, rice and avocado in rotation.
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
- Zinfandel (old-vine)
- Also Right
- Shiraz or Malbec
- From the Taps
- Smoked porter
- Zero-Proof
- Cherry cola, honestly
Barbecue’s sweet-smoke wants jammy fruit that shakes hands with the sauce; dry austere reds argue with sugar and lose.
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