Jocón

As tradition built it

Jocón

Huehuetenango, Mam Maya; ICH of the Nation, 2007

Ingredients

The chicken

• 900g chicken, a free-range hen if you can
• 720ml water
• 1 onion, with its stalk
• 1 green tomato
• 2 cloves garlic
• to taste salt

The green sauce

• 1.4 litres the chicken's broth
• 450g green tomatoes, less the one above
• 2 green peppers
• 115g miltomate (tomatillo), chopped
• 6 stalks cebollín (spring onion)
• 6 sprigs cilantro
• 2 tbsp corn flour (masa harina)
• to taste salt

Method

1. Put the chicken in a large pot with the water, the onion with its stalk, one green tomato, the garlic and salt. Cook over a medium heat until the chicken is well done.
2. Lift out the chicken and keep the broth.
3. Pour the broth into another pot. Add the rest of the green tomatoes, the peppers, the miltomate, the cebollín and the cilantro, and cook until soft.
4. Blend it smooth and pass it through a fine sieve or chinois.
5. Cook the strained sauce over a medium heat for 5 minutes and correct the salt.
6. Add the chicken. Dissolve the corn flour in a little cold water, stir it in, and cook a few minutes more until the sauce is as thick as you want it.
7. Serve hot with white rice and corn tortillas.

Notes

The government's own cultural directory gives the name as deriving from K'iche' "jok'om," green sauce or five greens, a plausible but not independently confirmed etymology.

The recipe is the Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes de Guatemala's, from its Sistema de Información Cultural. Rocío Cetino, for Aprende Guatemala, thickens hers with toasted pumpkin seed and pepitoria ground in the blender, fries garlic, jalapeño, green pepper and onion in oil, and shreds the chicken into the sauce; served in a deep plate with rice, avocado and tortillas dipped in the recado. Neither puts sesame or tortilla in the pot.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide poach and chinois clarity

Rung 01

Method

1. Poach the chicken sous vide to a precise, still-moist doneness, reserving the poaching liquid as the base broth rather than boiling the meat through and risking it toughening.
2. Blend the tomatillo, cilantro and thickening seeds in a high-power blender, then pass through a chinois for a green sauce with real clarity rather than the slightly grainy result straining by hand tends to leave.
3. Toast the sesame and pepitoria in the spice grinder before blending them in, the same toasting logic that underpins pepián above.