Iberia · Volume 10, Bacalhau and the Long Way Home
Caldo Verde
Minho, and now the whole country
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- 2 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The dish is genuinely old peasant food, "comida de sustento," subsistence food for rural labourers, built from whatever the land gave; one popular claim dates it to the mid fifteenth century, which cannot be fully right, since the potato only reached Portugal after the sixteenth century Spanish importation from the Andes and did not spread widely until the eighteenth. The more honest claim, and the one this chapter makes, is that a kale broth predates the potato and the two were combined later, with the specific date lost.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6. About 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 450 g potatoes, peeled and quartered
- 1 medium onion
- 1 to 2 garlic cloves
- 2 litres water
- to taste salt
- 500 g couve galega, or cavolo nero as a substitute
- about 200 ml olive oil
- 1 chouriço, sliced, to serve
Method
- Boil the potatoes, onion and garlic together in salted water until fully soft, 20 to 25 minutes.
- Blend or mash smooth into a purée, directly in the pot.
- Shred the couve galega, or cavolo nero, into ribbons as thin as you can manage, almost transparent, always cutting against the central rib to avoid long stringy fibres.
- Bring the purée back to the boil, add the kale, and cook uncovered for 2 to 3 minutes only, no longer, so the ribbons cook through in the residual heat of the returning boil without turning grey.
- Stir in the olive oil generously off the heat, not during cooking, and serve with sliced chouriço.
What a modern chef changes
The one cut this dish cannot survive getting wrong, done with real precision
Kit note, not tied to a numbered rung.
Method
- Cut the kale on a mandoline set to its thinnest safe setting, rather than by knife, for a genuinely even, near transparent ribbon that cooks through uniformly in the same two to three minutes rather than leaving thicker pieces undercooked and thinner ones grey.
- Blend the potato base through a chinois after the stick blender, for a silkier purée than a home kitchen usually bothers with, closer to what the dish's smoothness is actually asking for.
- Finish with a proper Portuguese olive oil rather than a generic one, since the dish is simple enough that a mediocre oil is genuinely audible in it.