The Southern Cone · Volume 26, Coast, Valley and the Mapuche and German South
Cazuela
Central valley, contested origin
Illustration
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 30 sources in the brief
Genuinely contested in its origin, and this chapter states that rather than picking a side. One story, semi-legendary, ties the name to an 1826 banquet honouring Admiral Manuel Blanco Encalada; a second traces it to a Mapuche broth, corri achawal, fowl with potato, squash, corn, beans, chilli and quinoa, the Spanish possibly renaming an existing indigenous dish. Neither survives to a documented primary source, and even Spanish-language reference sources flag the first as needing one.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. About 45 minutes of active cooking.
Ingredients
- 6 bone-in pieces (chicken, beef or turkey) a whole piece of bone-in meat: beef, chicken or turkey
- 6 medium potato
- 3 pieces pumpkin (squash)
- 3 cobs, in pieces corn
- 1 cup green beans, sliced
- 3, sliced into rounds carrot
- 1 cup, or chuchoca rice or chuchoca, often
Method
- Simmer the bone-in meat first, for a properly rich broth.
- Add the potato, carrot, sliced green beans and rice, and cook roughly 10 minutes.
- Add the squash and corn, and cook a further 10 minutes.
- Serve the meat and vegetables largely whole in the broth rather than shredded through it. About 45 minutes of active cooking in total, for six servings, using bone-in cuts.
What a modern chef changes
Meat cooked sous vide, and the broth clarified to a consommé
Method
- Cook the meat sous vide, separately from the vegetables, at a temperature that holds it properly tender rather than the boiled, greying result simmering alongside vegetables tends to give.
- Reduce the reserved bones and trim into the actual broth base, then clarify it through a chinois into something closer to a genuine consommé.
- Pour the clarified broth over the vegetables and meat only at the point of serving, rather than muddying together in the pot.
- Cook the squash separately and blend a portion of it back into the broth with a high-power blender for body, rather than relying on rice alone to thicken it.