Cuban · Side
Yuca con Mojo
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, an earthy, grounding base, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 1.2kg yuca, fresh or frozen
- 25g salt for the cooking water
- 150ml olive oil
- 40g garlic (about 12 cloves)
- 6g flaky salt
- 3g ground cumin
- 120ml naranja agria juice, or 80ml orange juice with 40ml lime juice
- 150g white onion, in thin rings
- 1g cracked black pepper
Equipment
Mortar & pestle
The skills inside
Salted water & the float testMashing & puréeing
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
- Cut the yuca into 8cm lengths, pare away the brown bark and the pink underskin beneath it, split each length and pull out the woody central cord, which never softens.
- Boil hard in heavily salted water until a knife meets no grip and the pieces begin to split along their seams, 20 to 30 minutes; drain and keep them hot in the covered pan. 30 min
- Mash the garlic with the flaky salt to a loose paste in a mortar and scrape it into a heatproof bowl with the cumin, the onion rings and the pepper.
- Heat the olive oil until it shimmers and a scrap of garlic fizzes the instant it lands, around 130C (265F), and pour it straight over the paste; it should hiss and foam up.
- Whisk the sour orange juice in off the heat, taste for salt, and pour the mojo over the hot yuca so it drinks while the starch is still open.
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.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
Salted water & the float test 188 recipes
- The water was salted before anything went in, and tasting it confirms it: seasoned on the tongue, with the salt dissolved rather than sitting on the pot floor.
- There is enough water, hot enough, that the pot returns to its boil quickly after the food goes in and never stops moving.
- Where the dish uses the float as its signal, the signal is obeyed: the pieces rise and they come out then, not several minutes later once something else was finished.
- Nothing is stuck to the bottom of the pot or welded to itself, and the water has not thickened into a cloudy sludge.
- Drained on a bite rather than on the clock: resistance at the centre, with no chalky raw core.
Where it goes wrong The pot was too small and the water unsalted, so it never recovered its boil: the food sat in slack water, went gummy at the surface, and comes out bland in a way that no sauce afterwards can fix.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.