This delicious soup my Bolivian friend taught me might be a 7000-year-old recipe. Click at right for the story, recipe and how-to-photos.
Photo: Yulia Converse.
6.29.2011
6.28.2011
See How to Do It
Bolivian Peanut Soup
Sopa de mani
While the meat is cooking in the salted water, cut your veggies...
This is the incredible quilquina plant. It's as strong as cilantro, only different.
Make an herb bundle of parsley, cilantro, and quilquina if you have it, and slice across it over a bowl.
These are the raw peanuts. Okay, they aren't WHITE, but they're almost white. Cream colored. They turn super white in the blender with water.
raw peanuts + water look like a milk shake! But don't drink... it must be cooked!
Add mashed garlic and spices to the peanut soup broth
The butcher cuts in Bolivia are 1 inch segments. Here they're honkin' big, so we took the meat off the bone, discarded the bone and returned the meat in bite size pieces into the soup.
She rubbed the oregano between the palms of her hand over the pot, releasing herb mojo. Awesome.
Raw potato, cut up for frying.
The lovely grounds of the Sweetser Apple Barrel and Orchard, where Rommy is the farm manager... and resident Bolivian cooking guru.
And finally, the one and only, sopa de mani.
Photos by Lindsay Sterling and Yulia Converse.
6.27.2011
The Story
Peanuts are White, Folks
By Lindsay Sterling
I’m into peanuts these days for a handful of reasons. I recently learned how to cook an awesome peanut soup from Ghana. Soon after learning that, I happen go to, of all things, a professional peanut conference in Napa Valley. I sat next to – I’m not kidding – a VP of Peanut Butter. He works for Smucker’s. Nice guy. Scientists basically told us at the conference that peanuts are little vitamin pills. A couple days after I get home, my Bolivian friend offers to teach me how to make her favorite soup, sopa de mani. Guess what mani means. Peanut. I’m like, what thuh...why are peanuts suddenly coming at me from everywhere?
Well, the phenomenon has been a good ten thousand years in the making. From the moment Mother Nature gave birth to peanuts (it is thought in Bolivia) over 7600 years ago, they’ve been getting around. A necklace of gold and silver peanut shells found in a 2000-year-old tomb in Peru shows how much people revered them. (This necklace is stunning. Ever since I saw its picture online, I want it. Honey?...The Lord of Sipán’s necklace? For my birthday?) It is thought that Spanish or Portuguese explorers then introduced peanuts to Africa and Asia. Peanuts, it is thought, came to us by way of the African slave trade.
Well, you won’t believe our luck, but my Bolivian friend happens to be 99.9% Quechua! That’s a native population in Bolivia that goes back way before Europeans ever arrived. She could be the progeny of one of the original peanut eating peoples on the planet! Her grandparents still make sopa de mani at 3am and eat it for breakfast at 5am, before going to work in the potato fields. So...we’re talking about a cooking method – blending peanuts and using them in soup broth - that could go back, like, seven thousand years! Most of the main ingredients in this soup are native to Bolivia: potatoes, peppers, green beans, and peanuts. The Spaniards and Portuguese likely inspired adding beef, garlic, carrots, and oregano, after they came in the 1500s. Before they arrived, the soup was likely vegetarian or made with alpaca meat.
Now here’s what really threw me when I watched my Bolivian friend cook. All my life I thought peanuts were brown, but that’s only because I’ve never pulled a peanut out of the ground, peeled off the fibrous shell and papery red skin, and looked at the raw, unprocessed nut (technically, a legume). It’s white! She blended the raw nuts in a blender with water, and the puree looked as white as a vanilla milkshake. She intercepted me from tasting it, though. “Raw peanuts need to be cooked an hour at least or it makes the tummy ache. That’s what my mom says.” We mixed the puree into the soup broth we’d made of beef ribs, water, salt, diced onion, green pepper, carrot, red pepper, and slivers of green beans, and the soup turned as white as clam chowder. In the end, she placed a mound of fried potato strips in the middle of each bowl, and sprinkled chiffonade of fresh parsley and cilantro on top. Each person at the table put in their own dollop of a homemade hot sauce, llajua. “YAH hwah,” I practiced saying it. It sounds like how I feel about learning this soup. You’ve got to try it.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011
6.24.2011
Print the Recipe
Bolivian Peanut Soup
Sopa de mani
As Rommy Holman, from Cochabamba, Bolivia, taught Lindsay Sterling in Cumberland, Maine, June 2011
Serves 8
Cooking Time: 2-3 hours.
1 Tbsp salt
4 beef ribs or bone-in cut of beef 1 small red onion
2 small carrots
1/2 green pepper, medium dice
1/4 red bell pepper, medium dice
10 green beans, sliced diagonally across for long, thin ovals
1/2 pound skinless raw peanuts (they're not tan or brown, they're cream-colored and may be called blanched)
4 yukon potatoes
1/2 cup white rice
1 big clove garlic
1/2 tsp powdered cumin
1/4 tsp black pepper
handful fresh cilantro
handful fresh parsley
small bunch fresh celery leaves
1/4 cup peas
crusty bread
llajua (a fresh hot sauce condiment)
1 tomato
1 jalepeno
small handful cilantro
1 tsp dried oregano
Fill soup pot 2/3 full of water, add 1 Tbsp salt and beef. Bring to boil and simmer for 1 hour or two (longer for the tougher cuts of meat). Keep a lid on to keep broth from evaporating too much. As the soup simmers, skim any fat and foam that rise to the top of the soup with a big flat spoon into a small bowl for easy discarding.
While the meat broth is brewing, cut your veggies. cut carrots lengthwise into 1/4" thick planks and then crosswise into 1/4" strips. Dice green and red pepper and onion. And cut the green beans on the diagonal to make thin long ovals. Put the veggies in the soup pot.
Make a raw peanut puree by blending the peanuts in a blender with about a cup of water until you have what looks like almost melting vanilla ice cream. After the meat has cooked for at least an hour, add the peanut puree so the soup turns white with a creamy top surface. Continue cooking for an hour. I wouldn't fudge that particular cooking time because Rommy said, "Raw peanuts need to be cooked an hour at least or it makes the tummy ache. That's what my mom says." An hour then! Stir occasionally so peanut particles don't burn on the bottom. As this cooks, go ahead and do the following.
Mash garlic and 1/4 tsp pepper and 1/2 tsp cumin (and a little salt to aid the grinding) in a mortar and pestle. Don't forget to smell this because it's VERY satisfying. Add to soup.
Now it's time to prep for the soup garnishes.
Make a bowl of fresh feathery herbs by gathering a tight bouquet of parsley and cilantro (she'd also use quilquina if she were home) and cutting across them toward your thumb with a paring knife. Fry potato strips.
Make fried potato strips by slicing potatoes across into round slices, and then slicing across the the slices to make thin strips. Covered with water (to keep from turning brown) until soup is almost done.
Make homemade hotsauce, called llajua, by pulsing in the the blender ever so slowly fresh jalapenoes, tomatoes, and fresh cilantro (again, she'd use quilquina at home). Her mother would make it on a traditional tool, a rectangular mortar and pestle called a batan. Avoid putting the blender on full blast - it makes the hotsauce foamy, which is not authentic! Serve in dishes on table for individuals to spoon into soup as they like.
After the peanuts have simmered with the soup about an hour, add a cup of rice. After rice has cooked for about ten minutes, use cooking twine to tie a bouquet of celery leaves and parsley leaves and steep bouquet in the soup. Sprinkle dried oregano over top. Now taste the soup. Add salt so that it tastes the best it can be. I added about a tsp. Take meat out of the pot. Pull meat off bone, discard bone, and put meat back in soup.
Strain potato strips. Pat dry with paper towels. Heat a half-inch of oil in a frying pan on medium high. Get a plate with paper towel over it ready for drying the fries. Test one strip in the oil. You want it to bubble vigorously. If it doesn't, let the oil get hotter before adding potatoes. They'll come out soggy if you add them to not-hot-enough oil. If the oil is smoking - it's too hot. The fried potato strips are done when they're golden brown; remove them from the oil with a slotted spoon or tongs and put them on paper towels to dry. Salt them.
When the rice in the soup is cooked, add peas. When they're cooked, serve soup in shallow bowls, sprinkle fried potatoes in the center of each bowl and fresh herbs all over top. Serve with chunks of baguette and the llajua on the table.
copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011
6.02.2011
Panamanian Arroz con Pollo
When Gina Barria was ten years old, she would climb the tallest pine tree she knew in Panama City so she could see what felt like the whole world: the ocean, the big city, the mountains, and the church. Now, twenty-eight years old, she's still expanding that horizon from the vantage point of Maine, U.S.A., where she lives, works, and studies English and cooking. She taught me how to make her favorite dish from home, sure to become a classic in my house too. Gina came here to improve her English and can say now with confidence, "I always wanted to see the world." Me too, Gina! Here's to the all the unimaginable treasures found along the way. Click at right for the recipe, story, and how-to photos.
Print the Recipe
Panamanian Arroz con Pollo
As Gina Barria, from Panama City, Panama, taught Lindsay Sterling in Freeport, Maine, May 2011
Serves 6
Cooking Time: About 2 hours
4 bone-in chicken legs and thighs
1/2 + 1 stalk celery
1 onion, peeled
2 cloves garlic
1 green pepper
1 small can tomato paste
2 cups rice
2 Tbsp "Better than Bouillon" Chicken paste
1/4 habanero pepper, diced (no seeds) (buy a bunch and keep in Ziploc in freezer)
small handful cilantro leaves or 1 culantro leaf
1 cup pitted Spanish green olives
plantain or banana leaf, (substitute tinfoil if you can't find this at your Asian or Latin market)
1 small jar roasted red peppers, drained and medium-diced
Put two of the chicken leg-thighs in a soup pot half full with water, and turn heat on to boil. Add one half stalk celery (leaving the remaining stem for later), one layer of the onion flesh and 2 tsp salt to the water. You are making a broth here that you will use instead of plain water to cook the rice. You are also cooking half the chicken - which you'll pull off the bone once it's cooked. Keep this at a low boil as you do the next steps, skimming off the foam and amber colored liquified chicken fat at the surface with a large flat spoon.
On a cutting board next to the sink, pull the skins off the remaining 2 chicken leg-thighs. Trim and discard any fat. Cut the meat off the bones and dice meat into small bite-sized pieces. Put the bones in the broth pot with the other chicken legs. Put the meat pieces in a large shallow pot or saute pan with lid. Wash with soapy water everything that touched the raw chicken (cutting board knife, hands). On the clean cutting board, cut the rest of the onion, the green pepper and the celery all into a medium dice (1/4 inch cubes), and mince the garlic and habanero(s).
Add about 1/4 cup total of a little bit of the all of the vegetables you just cut up to the chicken in the frying pan with a couple tablespoons of oil and saute until chicken pieces are opaque all the way through. And 1 Tbsp of the Better than Boullion paste. The final dish has a much more robust flavor than any rice dish I've ever made in my life. I think this boullion paste is one of the secrets that makes it that way. The final dish as she made it wasn't just good. It was groan-inducing, so I recommend you do the Boullion paste thing. She says she likes this "Better than Boullion" brand because out of all the brands this one tastes the most natural. There is no MSG in this one, which I like.
Take one of the boiling chicken legs out and cut into it to see if it's opaque through all the meat. Take the two legs out and put them on a plate to cool. Keep the broth on the stove on low, you'll be ladling it hot into the rice and chicken dish in a bit. When chicken is cool enough to touch, pull the meat off the bone, discarding all the skins and any fat blobs, and pull the chicken meat into strips. Add this chicken to the chicken in the saute pot. So the dish has two two textures of chicken - sauteed bites and pulled pieces.
Add the whole can of tomato paste to the chicken meat. Add the rest of the chopped vegetables (onion, celery, green pepper, garlic, habanero) to the chicken, and mix all together into a red pasty chicken mass. Saute on medium heat, stirring frequently to keep the tomato paste burning on the bottom of the pan. Do this for about 3 minutes or until all the ingredients have really taken in the deep red of the cooked tomato paste. It should look less like a bunch of different ingredients and more like a uniform mass. When the tomato threatens to burn, add 3 ladles full of the the chicken broth to loosen.
In another large fry pan (or low large pot) with a lid, generously coated with oil, fry the rice, stirring constantly. (You do this to keep the rice grains separate in the final dish, not sticky or mushy). When the grains turn opaque but before any turn brown, add three ladles of broth to wet. Then mix the chicken and the rice together, and keep adding ladles of broth (about 7) so your mixture becomes loose like a thick soup. When you usually cook rice, you cover the rice about an 1/2 " with liquid. This was different. The rice grains in this case were incorporated into a red sauce, some grains showing on the surface of it, then sinking after thirty seconds so the top is just barely just liquid. Add cilantro or culantro (a stronger variety that grows like gangbusters in Panama) and olives. Taste the broth now. She added a little more salt here, and a teaspoon more of the bouillion paste. It should taste ooohhh so satisfying and perfect, kind of beyond belief good. If it doesn't, add more salt and more bouilion paste. Go ahead. Be brave.
Cover pot with a plantain or banana leaf (or tinfoil) and put lid on top and press down. This is to hold in steam in and infuse the rice with warm banana-leaf-aroma. If you can't find the banana leaves (in the freezer at your tropical-themed market), cover pot with tinfoil, press edges around the outside of the pot and put lid on top of that. Cook on medium low for 12 minutes. Cut the roasted pepper into medium dice. When twelve minutes is up, lift top and banana leaf and gently turn rice over with seven or eight turns of a serving spoon so the grains on top are on now on the bottom. Sprinkle roasted red pepper on the top, re-cover with leaf and lid, and cook another twelve minutes on low (I used setting 3 on my electric). The arroz is done when grains of rice break at the touch of a spoon, all the liquid has disappeared, and you have a sunset orange, delicious rice dish.
This dish is traditionally served at parties with with gorgeous, pink potato-and-beet salad and sauted yellow plaintain slices, but we just sat and ate it straight. UNBELIEVABLE!
Sauteed Plantains
serves 6 as a side dish
time: 20 minutes
4 yellow plantains with some black spots
vegetable oil
Heat a layer of oil in large saute pan on medium high. Take skins off plantains, and slice lenthgwise into 4-5 slices per plaintain. Cook in the oil about 5 minutes on each side until the pieces turn a deep yellow throughout with some golden brown on the outsides.
Panamanian Potato Salad
serves 6 as a side dish
cooking time: 1 hr
1/2 onion
1/2 stalk celery
oil
vinegar
salt
pepper
3 eggs
2 large beets, skins on
1 carrot, peeled
5 medium potatoes, skins on
I haven't yet seen Gina do this in person, but she told me how to do it and the result came out great - earning groans from my brother- and sister-in-law, niece and nephew - all who said they don't even like beets! And I don't think they were just being polite. They loved the festive pink color. Here's what I did.
In a large pot, boil together beets, carrot and potatoes (skins on). In a separate smaller pot, hard boil the eggs (simmer for 14 minutes, drain, soak in cold water, then peel while still a little warm).
While those are cooking, dice celery and onion and put in salad bowl with cider vinegar and oil (equal parts), and generous salt and pepper - you want this mixture nice and wet so that the vinegar and salt will mellow out the sharpness of the raw onion, shave off a little bit of the raw crunchy factor, and then add intense flavor all the boiled potatoes and beets which are pretty boring on their own.
When you can poke the carrot's inside with a fork, take it out. You want it to be not crunchy, but not mushy. When you can poke with a fork the potato's inside without resistance, take the potatoes out. Keep cooking the beets until you can poke their insides with a fork without resistance. Once the veggies are cool, peel the skins off with a paring knife, and cut into 1/2" pieces and mix into the salad bowl with the marinating veggies and dressing.
Peel the eggs, cut up and mix into salad, and/or decorate the top with yellow and white wedges or slices.
Where to Get Ingredients
Banana leaves and plantains grow in hot, tropical places. You can find them at immigrant markets - African, Asian, and Latin American. In Portland, Maine, where I live, I find them at Mittapheap World Market (61 Washington Ave. 773-5523) and La Bodega Latina (863 Congress St. 207-761-6661).
copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011
The Story
Mastering a Latin Classic
ImmigrantKitchens.com, ‘round-the-world cooking school
By Lindsay Sterling
As I was picking my daughter up from school, my ears perked up to a woman telling a child it was time to go. She had an accent. Her skin was brown, her eyes big and chocolate, her hair black and long. Since I’ve cooked with something like forty immigrants from all over the world, my guessing of people’s origins is getting better. Recently I asked a parking lot attendant in Boston if by any chance she was from Eritrea (a country next to Ethiopia) because she looked uncannily like the Eritrean woman who taught me how to make injera. The attendant was thrilled -- I’d guessed correctly! In San Francisco, I asked my airport shuttle driver, “Are you by any chance from Nicaragua? Your accent is exactly like my cooking teacher’s.” “Close!” He said, laughing with amazement, “El Salvador!” As for the woman in front of me, however, I had to ask. “Where are you from?”
“Panama,” she said, breaking into a smile. Her answer was particularly thrilling to me because a dish from Panama was a missing puzzle piece on my world culinary tour. The prospect of what might unfold from here gave me the butterflies. Learning my first dish from a country, even if I never step foot out of Maine, feels like a major geographic feat, a country traveled, a grand vista earned. So...would she teach me to cook her favorite dish from home?
“Yes,” she said definitively, nodding with a smile. God love the nice people of the world, inviting a stranger to a personal cooking lesson! It really feels like such a miracle when this is happening that I have to fight hard to keep from jumping up and down and looking crazy. Reigning in my exuberance, I responded. “Really? That would be so great!” My new cooking teacher’s name is Gina. Full name: Karol Gina Barria Somarriba. She is a 28-year-old nanny from Panama City, Panama, working and going to cooking school in greater Portland, Maine. She offered to give me the lesson when her semester was over in three weeks. It was a long wait.
Panamanian arroz con pollo is an insanely delicious mixture of chicken and rice, studded with green olives. It’s typically served at parties (accompanied by potato and beet salad and fried yellow plantains) because the ingredients are affordable: bone-in chicken legs, onions, celery, garlic, green pepper, tomato paste, rice, chicken stock, cilantro, green olives, habanero pepper, peas, carrots, and roasted red pepper. The cooking method superficially isn’t too complicated, but Gina says the dish took years to master. She first learned, as most women in her culture do, from her mother and grandmother when she was twelve. As the onions, peppers, celery and garlic sizzled with the chicken meat, and later, a few minutes after she laid a banana leaf over the pot and the kitchen filled with the aroma of sweet grass, the book, Like Water For Chocolate, came to mind. It expressed exactly what I was feeling right then: that cooking in the way that Gina was cooking has the power to change the course of reality big time. As we were enjoying the meal together, she displayed the final quality of an arroz con pollo master. “My mother’s is still better,” she said with requisite humility. Gina, I will be saying for a lifetime the same of yours.
copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011
6.01.2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
