The Andes · Volume 46, The Two Milks, the Azotea and the Covered Pot
Encebollado
Guayaquil
Illustration
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 67 sources in the brief
A soup of albacore and yuca in a tomato and onion broth, under pickled red onion: breakfast on the Ecuadorian coast and the cure after a long night. Jenny Estrada's history, as El Universo gives it, puts its ancestor in a picante de pescado of salted fish that the coastal cholos made for the dock and shipyard workers of Guayaquil, becoming the soup in the 1950s and 1960s and spreading in the 1980s as the cheap alternative to ceviche, sold by the cebicheros from buckets. Its two nicknames are muerte lenta (slow death) and levanta muertos (raise the dead). Ecuador declared it intangible heritage on 25 July 2024. The quantities are those of the Sabor section of El Universo, a newspaper recipe and not a named cook's; the cumin, the oil and the finishing herb are given without a measure.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 45 minutes.
Ingredients
- 900g (2 lb) albacore, in a piece
- 2 yuca, peeled, in chunks
- 3 tomatoes, for the broth
- 2 red onions, for the broth
- 4 cloves of garlic, for the broth
- to taste cumin, for the broth
- to cover water, for the broth
- 3 red onions, cebolla paiteña, sliced fine and pickled
- 6 limes, the juice, to pickle the onion
- to taste salt
- to serve oil
- to serve chopped parsley
- to serve chifles or bread, to eat with it
Method
- Slice the pickling onions fine, rinse them and pickle them in the lime juice and salt.
- Make a broth in the water with the tomatoes, the broth onions, the garlic and the cumin, and cook the yuca in it until tender. Season with salt.
- Cook the albacore in the broth, lift it out and flake it.
- Into each bowl put flaked fish and chunks of yuca, a heap of the pickled onion, a drizzle of oil and parsley, and the hot broth over.
- Eat with chifles or bread and a squeeze of lime.
What a modern chef changes
The broth made twice
Rung 6
Method
- Make a first broth on the fish's bones and skin and strain it, then cook the yuca and the fish in that: the soup tastes of fish before the fish is in it.
- Cook the albacore in the broth at 60 degrees for 12 minutes, which keeps it in flakes and not in threads.
- Pickle the onion an hour ahead in lime and salt with a pinch of sugar, and drain it before it goes on.
- Serve the broth from a pot at the table and pour it over in front of the eater, which is what the cebichero's bucket did.