Recipe Arroz con Pollo - Rice with Chicken

[blades]

Let's see if I can write an acceptable recipe from my memory. My version of this Spanish dish comes from my Cuban mother who made it often. I've made it a few hundred times myself.

Sofrito is the Spanish version of mirepoix. It is the Latin trinity. In Latin America it is onion, green bell pepper and garlic. In Spain it often changes the pepper to tomato. And sometimes it is a "quadrinity" with both pepper and tomato. So we will put sofrito to work. Another Latin staple is saffron rice and this recipe has it as well.

Ingredients

1 cup long grain rice
1 pinch saffron
2 cups chicken stock
1 medium onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, cleaned and chopped
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup of peas
oil of your choice for saute
salt and pepper to taste
Your choice of chicken meat - I usually use 5 or 6 chicken tenders for convenience sake Cut the chicken into chunks or strips as you prefer.

Method

1. Put a healthy pinch of saffron to steep in a small amount of water. Saffron releases its yellow color and flavor better in water than in oil.
2. Start cooking the rice in the chicken stock with some salt
3. Once the water has turned yellow from the saffron, add it saffron threads included to the rice and stir it in. Cover the rice and simmer until done.
4. Add some cooking oil to a skillet and saute the chicken, sofrito and salt and pepper.
5. Once the saffron rice and the sofrito are finished combine them in a bowl and add the peas if they are already cooked. Put raw peas with the rice when you cook it.

That's it. Feel free to make it a "quadrinity" with the addition of a tomato - at the end of course. Hope you like this popular comfort food from Latin America. I hope I met the requirements for a Cooking Bites recipe.

 

[TastyReuben]

Looks good - the only thing that I added was the Recipe prefix to the title, here:

That helps tremendously with filtering when searching for recipes in the ingredients forums - it’s a simple matter to filter off the prefix and just display recipes (or recipes with videos, etc).

 

[blades]

Looks good - the only thing that I added was the Recipe prefix to the title, here:

View attachment 100903

That helps tremendously with filtering when searching for recipes in the ingredients forums - it’s a simple matter to filter off the prefix and just display recipes (or recipes with videos, etc).

Got it. Thanks again.

 

[karadekoolaid]

It's an incredibly popular dish all over Latin America and yours is more than "acceptable" - it's authentic!
Venezuela uses a slightly different sofrito, in that we've got something here called "Ají Dulce", which is a sweet chile pepper. I'm pretty much convinced that the "ají dulce" is a mutant of the habanero. That's what we use instead of the green pepper, but I think we're probably the only country that does so.

 

[blades]

It's an incredibly popular dish all over Latin America and yours is more than "acceptable" - it's authentic!
Venezuela uses a slightly different sofrito, in that we've got something here called "Ají Dulce", which is a sweet chile pepper. I'm pretty much convinced that the "ají dulce" is a mutant of the habanero. That's what we use instead of the green pepper, but I think we're probably the only country that does so.

Thanks. It's an old family recipe. Aji dulce certainly qualifies as the pepper in a sofrito. I think the Mexicans often use an aji picante. I think that would count too but Cuban food isn't hot like Mexican food. It is closer to the Spanish origins of the cuisine. So I assume that the Venezuelan and Cuban versions of the dish are about the same. Very popular comfort food.

 

[Morning Glory]

Anything with saffron in it has me hooked. This sounds lovely.