Iberia · Volume 06, The Rice Coast
All i Pebre
Valencia, El Palmar
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 20 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The traditionalist rule for this dish is genuinely strict: garlic, oil, pimentón, eel and potato, and nothing more. Bread, almonds or chilli, sometimes used by cooks wanting a thicker sauce, are considered inauthentic additions by the Albufera's own cooks.
As tradition built it
About 20 minutes.
Ingredients
- 1kg fresh eel, cut into 4 to 5cm pieces
- 3 cloves garlic
- 2dl olive oil
- 2 tbsp pimentón
- 1kg potato
- to cover water or a light stock, to cover
Method
- Cut the fresh eel into pieces of four to five centimetres.
- Sauté the garlic gently in olive oil in a clay cazuela until fragrant, then add the pimentón and cook briefly.
- Add the eel and potato along with water or a light stock to cover.
- Simmer gently until the potato is tender and the eel cooked through, the sauce thickened only by the potato's own starch and the reduction of the liquid.
What a modern chef changes
Eel cooked sous vide, sauce finished through a chinois
Rungs 1 and 3
Method
- Portion the eel and cook it sous vide at 62°C for eighteen minutes, a temperature and time that renders its fat and collagen fully without the risk of overcooking a fish that toughens quickly in a simmering pot (rung 1's absorption logic applied to protein rather than rice).
- Build the garlic and pimentón base exactly as tradition demands (rung 3).
- Pass the sauce through a chinois before the eel is returned to it, giving a genuinely silky, grit-free result the traditional rustic version was never trying to achieve, offered here as a restaurant-plate option rather than a claim that it improves on the original.