Iberia · Volume 09, Gofio, the Guanche Grain Beneath a Castilian Table
Papas Arrugadas con Mojo
Tenerife and Gran Canaria, and by now the whole archipelago
Illustration
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Researched
- 4 sources cited
The dish a visitor meets first and the one a Canarian cook never really stops making. Its heart is the potato itself: traditionally one of the papas antiguas, the Andean landrace varieties that reached the islands within a generation or two of 1492 and were then left essentially unchanged while the varieties that continued on to mainland Europe were bred differently there, small, thin-skinned, dense-fleshed tubers suited to nothing else quite so well as this method.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 40 minutes.
Ingredients
- 1 kg small, thin-skinned potatoes, ideally papas antiguas or the smallest waxy new potatoes available
- 100 g coarse sea salt, or enough to bring the water close to seawater salinity
- to cover water to cover
Mojo rojo
- 2 ripe tomatoes, peeled
- 1 ñora or dried choricero pepper, soaked
- 1 dried cayenne or guindilla, to taste
- 1 garlic clove
- ½ tsp cumin seed
- 1 tsp sweet paprika
- 40 ml white wine vinegar
- 40 ml olive oil
- a pinch coarse salt
Mojo verde
- 1 large bunch fresh coriander
- 2 garlic cloves
- 1 small green pepper
- ½ tsp cumin seed
- 30 ml white wine vinegar
- 60 ml olive oil
- a pinch coarse salt
Method
- Cover the potatoes with water in a heavy pot, salt heavily, closer to seawater than to ordinary cooking water, and bring to a simmer.
- Cook 20 to 25 minutes, until just tender.
- Pour away most of the water, leaving only a thin film in the bottom of the pot, and return the pot to high heat, uncovered, shaking and stirring frequently, until every trace of surface moisture is gone and the skins have wrinkled under a visible white salt crust.
- For the mojo rojo, pound the garlic, cumin and soaked pepper to a paste in a mortar, work in the paprika, dried cayenne or guindilla to taste, and a pinch of coarse salt, then add the tomato, and finally the vinegar and oil in a thin stream, beating as if mounting a mayonnaise until the sauce holds together rather than separating.
- For the mojo verde, pound the garlic, cumin, green pepper and half the coriander to a paste, then add the vinegar and oil as above, beating to an emulsion, and stir through the rest of the coriander, roughly chopped, at the end.
- Serve the potatoes hot, wrinkled skins on, with both mojos alongside.
What a modern chef changes
The salinity and the reduction controlled with real precision, and the mojo built as the true emulsion the tradition already describes
Rung 1 and Rung 2
Method
- Weigh the salt against the water rather than salting by eye, aiming for a genuine seawater salinity of around 3.5 per cent, so the wrinkling stage works reliably rather than depending on guesswork built up over years of a Canarian cook's own experience.
- Build both mojos in a high-power blender on a slow, steady stream of oil, exactly the discipline a mayonnaise depends on, rather than tipping the oil in all at once and risking a split sauce; strain the finished mojo rojo through a chinois for a smoother, restaurant-grade texture if the tomato skins have left any fibre behind.
- Dehydrate a portion of the potato skins separately at a low, steady heat and crumble them over the dish as a salt-crust garnish, a genuine use for the intensely flavoured, well-salted skin the drying-down stage produces, rather than serving it only as part of the whole potato.