Sopa de caracol

Name: Sopa de caracol
Total time: 1 h
Yield: Serves 2
Cuisine: The Garifuna and Caribbean Coast
Ingredients: 1 fish head; as needed water; 2 leaves culantro; ½ white onion, diced; 2 bay leaves; 2 conch fillets; ½ white onion, finely chopped; 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped; ½ green pepper, finely chopped; 2 plum tomatoes, finely chopped; 3 leaves culantro, finely chopped; 225g yuca, in medium dice; 2 green bananas, in medium dice; 3 leaves sweet basil, finely chopped; 240ml coconut milk; as needed salt and pepper

Garifuna coast, Honduras

Sopa de caracol, a white conch soup: a shallow white bowl of pale, undyed coconut broth with visible squares of conch meat, served beside two smooth pale plantain mash balls set on a small separate side plate rather than in the bowl.

Illustration

Time: 1 hour

As tradition built it

Sopa de caracol

Serves 2. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

The stock

1 fish head
as needed water
2 leaves culantro
½ white onion, diced
2 bay leaves

The conch

2 conch fillets

The sofrito

½ white onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
½ green pepper, finely chopped
2 plum tomatoes, finely chopped
3 leaves culantro, finely chopped

The soup

225g yuca, in medium dice
2 green bananas, in medium dice
3 leaves sweet basil, finely chopped
240ml coconut milk
as needed salt and pepper

Method

Boil the fish head in water with the culantro, diced onion and bay for 20 minutes over a low heat. Strain it and keep the stock.
Meanwhile open the conch out like a butterfly, pound it until it is completely soft, and cut it small.
Fry the sofrito ingredients together for 5 minutes. Blend them with the stock and return it to the pot.
Add the yuca and green bananas and cook until soft.
Add the basil and the coconut milk.
Add the conch last, take the pot straight off the heat, and season. Serve with machuca on the side.

Notes

This stands against the more commonly seen commercial version, coloured orange with annatto.

The recipe is chef Carlos Espinal's, for Buen Provecho, the Honduran food channel. It is the white soup, with no achiote, and the conch cooks only in the heat of the pot. Honduras.com's version boils two tins of coconut milk with the yuca and colours it with a quarter teaspoon of achiote.

What a modern chef changes

Precision on the one variable that matters

Rung 01, 03

Method

Cook the conch sous vide, at a precise low temperature for a controlled few minutes, for an even, genuinely tender result rather than the uneven texture a quick open-pot boil can give a thick-walled mollusc, since the single variable that matters most is exactly the one the tradition already names: do not over-cook the conch, and do not colour the broth.
Build the broth's body from a slow reduction of coconut milk with the yuca and plantain, passed through a chinois for a silkier, whiter result with no annatto anywhere near it, keeping faith with the tradition's own stated correctness rather than modernising away from it.
Serve the machuca balls formed with a hand-held ice-cream scoop for a genuinely neater, more even shape than hand-rolling gives, a small, honest kitchen convenience rather than a real technique change.

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