Arroz con pollo

As tradition built it

Arroz con pollo

About 30 minutes, with the chicken cooked first.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

The rice

• a splash olive oil
• 1½ tbsp achiote
• 120ml bacon, chopped
• 6 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 small onion, chopped
• ½ chile dulce (sweet pepper), chopped
• 240ml carrot, diced
• celery
• 480ml parboiled rice
• 600ml chicken, cooked and shredded
• 960ml chicken stock
• to taste Worcestershire sauce
• 180ml sweetcorn
• 1 small tin petits pois
• 60ml culantro, chopped
• 120ml raisins
• to taste salt and pepper

The eggs

• ½ stick butter
• 4 eggs
• to taste salt and pepper

Method

1. Heat the oil and achiote in a pot.
2. Add the bacon, garlic, onion, sweet pepper, carrot and celery.
3. Add the rice and chicken and fry them together a minute.
4. Add the stock, Worcestershire sauce, sweetcorn, petits pois, culantro and raisins. Season with salt and pepper and cover.
5. Cook until the rice bursts, 18 to 20 minutes.
6. Melt the butter and fry the eggs. Season them and serve the rice with an egg on top.

Notes

Rooted in Spanish rice-and-chicken tradition, adapted with achiote for colour, and Salsa Lizano and Worcestershire in the sofrito.

A Sunday and celebration dish, rooted in the historically widespread Costa Rican practice of keeping backyard chickens, making it accessible rather than elite, and specifically named among the signature dishes of the Soda Palace, the San José institution.

The recipe is chef Lorena Velázquez's, for Teletica, Costa Rica's Canal 7. Carol Uriza of San José, on Cocinen Conmigo, poaches a whole chicken first in a broth coloured with turmeric and tomato paste, toasts raw rice, cooks it uncovered 20 minutes in that broth, and finishes with ketchup. Recetas de Costa Rica uses Salsa Lizano.

What a modern chef changes

Held temperature, clarified stock

Method

1. Poach the chicken sous vide at a precise, held temperature rather than a rolling simmer, keeping it properly moist through the second cooking it undergoes once folded into the finished rice.
2. Bloom whole achiote seed in fat and grind it fresh in a spice grinder rather than reaching for a commercial paste, for a cleaner colour and a less muddy pepper note.
3. Pass the poaching stock through a chinois before it goes into the rice, for a clarity a home pot rarely achieves on the first try, closer to what a soda's decades of practice would produce by habit than what a single home attempt usually manages.