The Andes · Volume 46, The Two Milks, the Azotea and the Covered Pot
Encocado de pescado
Esmeraldas, and the southern Colombian Pacific
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 67 sources in the brief
Fish stewed in coconut milk with the herbs of the azotea, the thin milk first and the thick milk last. Both sides of the line between Colombia and Ecuador claim it, and we rule on neither. In Muisne, Doña Olga Mojarrango, sixty five, grates the coconut and extracts its milk, cooks it with the fish, garlic, onion, pepper, coriander, chillangua and chirarán, and lets it boil until it thickens; Martha Klinger, seventy two, is known in the same town for the thickness of her milk. The Ministry's Colombian cooks give two versions, from the Mayorquín and from Tumaco, and the method below draws on both. The encocao of crab became Tumaco's symbolic dish on the Bocagrande beach, where the coconut groves were and the blue crab was trapped in wooden traps; since the earthquake and tsunami of 1979 the few hotels left keep crabs in baskets fed on ripe plantain and let the visitor choose. Quantities are the cooks'; where they gave none, the line reads "to taste".
As tradition built it
Serves 4.
Ingredients
- 4 river fish, sábalo or a scaleless fish
- 1 coconut, grated and pressed for two milks
- 240ml (1 cup) refrito of onion, tomato and azotea herbs
- to taste chiyangua
- to taste chirarán
- to taste salt
- to serve white rice
- to serve patacones
Method
- Gut the fish, wash it with hot water and rub it with lime. Grate the coconut and press it for two milks, keeping the thin and the thick apart.
- Make the refrito of onion, tomato and the azotea herbs.
- Put the refrito and the thin coconut milk in the pot and cook at medium heat, stirring, until it reduces to a sauce.
- Add the fish, seasoned with salt. When the sauce has dried a little, add the thick milk, "que quede bien cremosa" (so that it ends up creamy), and the chiyangua and chirarán.
- Leave about 10 minutes more, until the fish is just cooked; it needs very little time. Never cover the pot. Serve with rice and patacones.
What a modern chef changes
The milks weighed, the fish timed
Rungs 2 and 6
Method
- Press the coconut in a blender with warm water and a nut milk bag: 480ml of water for the thin milk, 240ml for the thick, and keep them apart.
- Reduce the thin milk with the refrito to a third before the fish goes in, which the cooks do by eye.
- Cut the fish in even pieces, salt it 20 minutes ahead, and add it to the pot off the boil; it poaches in 6 minutes.
- Add the thick milk at 80 degrees and never above, and finish with the herbs torn, not chopped, so the chiyangua is tasted whole.