Mote Pillo

As tradition built it

Mote Pillo

Serves 3 · 20 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 stalks, chopped white onion or leek
• 1 clove, minced garlic
• 1 tbsp butter or lard
• 1 tbsp achiote oil (or ground achiote to colour) achiote, ground
• 2 cups mote, cleaned and cooked
• 1 cup milk
• 4 eggs, lightly beaten
• ¼ cup spring onion tops, chopped
• 2 tbsp, chopped coriander
• to serve fresh cheese, sliced, to serve
• to serve coffee, to serve

Method

1. Make a refrito of white onion or leek and garlic in butter or lard with ground achiote, cooked gently for around five minutes until soft and coloured.
2. Add roughly two cups of cleaned, cooked mote and cook for a further two minutes to warm it through and coat it in the fat.
3. Pour in around one cup of milk and let it reduce until nearly absorbed by the corn.
4. Add four lightly beaten eggs and stir through gently, cooking for about five minutes until just set, taking care not to scramble them hard.
5. Finish with chopped spring onion tops and coriander, and serve for breakfast with sliced fresh cheese and coffee.

Notes

This dish is genuinely different from its close cousins: mote sucio, the same corn cooked down in a paila with chicharrón and pork lard until it takes on the crisp pork's colour and smoke, is a market and everyday-lunch dish rather than a breakfast one, and mote pata, a much thicker soup built with pork, chorizo, longaniza, ground squash seed and peanut, belongs specifically to the fortnight around Carnival and to nowhere else in the country, according to Ecuadorian food writers, who are firm that it is a genuinely exclusive Cuenca dish.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide egg custard, rendered chicharrón, toasted peanut dust

Method

1. Cook the eggs sous vide rather than in the pan, holding them at 63°C in the mote and milk mixture just long enough to set into a soft, custard-like curd rather than a fried texture, then fold that custard through the corn at the last moment rather than scrambling it in over direct heat.
2. Render the chicharrón element, borrowed from mote sucio's own logic rather than mote pillo's, separately and slowly until genuinely crisp, then use it as a scattered garnish on top of the softer, custard-bound mote pillo underneath, giving one plate the textures of both dishes rather than treating them as strictly separate.
3. Finish with a spoonful of ground toasted peanut, borrowed again, this time from mote pata, dry toasted and ground fine on a spice grinder, dusted over the top as a final, genuinely southern flourish that ties all three of Cuenca's mote dishes into one plate without pretending they are the same thing.