Chilpachole de jaiba

As tradition built it

Chilpachole de jaiba

Serves 4. About 50 minutes.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp oil
• 3 guajillo chiles, seeded
• ½ onion, in large dice
• 1 clove garlic
• 2 tomatoes, in eighths
• 1.9 litres fish stock
• 240ml crab meat
• 2 potatoes, peeled, diced small and cooked
• 1 sprig epazote

Method

1. Heat the oil in a pan. Fry the guajillo chiles in it for a few seconds, then lift them out.
2. Add the onion and garlic and cook over a medium heat until they start to soften. Add the tomato and cook a couple of minutes.
3. Add 240ml of the stock and the chiles and cook 10 minutes. Blend it.
4. Return the blended sauce to the pan with the crab meat, the potatoes, the rest of the stock and the epazote. Cook until the crab is done and the broth smells of epazote.

Notes

Masa comes into it in two of the Veracruz recipes as dumplings, chochoyotes, never as a thickener; the broth itself is chile and tomato.

The recipe is chef Omar Sandoval's, for Directo al Paladar México. Larousse Cocina and El Universal make a different chilpachole: roasted tomato, jalapeño and cinnamon, whole halved crabs simmered in the broth, and masa dumplings, chochoyotes, cooked in it. El Universal's are 100g of masa rolled into 20 balls, each pressed with a navel, cooked 10 minutes over a low heat.

What a modern chef changes

Comal-toasted base, hand-picked crab

Method

1. Comal-toast the guajillo chile and tomato hard, on the Big Green Egg's direct heat, before blending, for real Maillard development the simple simmer skips entirely.
2. Pass the blended base through a chinois for a genuinely silky broth rather than one carrying stray skin and seed.
3. Pick the crab meat by hand from freshly cooked, whole crab rather than using pre-picked meat.
4. Fold in a small amount of cold brown butter at the very end, in the spirit of the London kitchen Cometa's own honest reworking of this dish, a technique added on top of a correctly built base rather than a substitution for it.