Vori vori (bori bori)

As tradition built it

Serves 2. About 40 minutes.

Ingredients

• 2 chicken tenderloin strips
• half an onion
• half a locote (bell pepper)
• a quarter carrot
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 spring onion
• 1 litre broth or water
• 100g maize flour
• 2 tbsp cassava starch
• as needed broth, as needed
• 50g queso Paraguay
• to taste salt and pepper

Method

1. Sauté the onion, pepper, carrot and garlic in a little oil until soft.
2. Add the chicken and brown lightly, then pour in the broth and bring to a simmer.
3. Mix the maize flour, cassava starch and grated queso Paraguay with a little water into a stiff paste, and roll into small dumplings.
4. Drop the dumplings into the simmering broth and cook until they float and are cooked through, topping up with more broth if the soup reduces too far.
5. Finish with chopped spring onion.

Notes

Quantities sourced to a Paraguayan home cook's own recipe video, moderate confidence, internally consistent with the wider tradition.

What a modern chef changes

A clarified broth, and a more evenly bound dumpling

Rung 1

Method

1. Build a properly clarified stock separately, skimmed rather than left cloudy, so the finished soup reads as a considered broth rather than a cloudy everyday pot.
2. Emulsify the cassava starch and cheese for the dumplings in a blender before rolling, giving a more even bind and a more consistent texture from dumpling to dumpling than hand-mixing achieves. Rung 1.