Hi and welcome to our show on Everyday Dish TV. My Brian Igarta and I’m the author of The Maui Vegetarian and today we’re going to cook up for you something special. We’re going to be cooking our Puerto Rican soup and before we start, I’d like to introduce to you if you haven’t already known it is a nice little spice called annatto which is a pretty common in Hawaii and also all parts of South America.
It’s this nice little plant here that has pods and inside of each pod we have seeds in it. And what you do is break apart the pods then try to get the seeds out and the seeds look like this. And what we’re going to do with these seeds, this is basically our special flavor of the soup is we’re going to infuse it with some olive oil and how we do that is we’ll just add some oil to the pan and we’re using olive oil for this dish. And we’re going just drop it in like so and this kind of have a soft, runny kind of texture or a smell and also a saffron kind of taste.
So, what we want to do is we’re looking for the bubbles around the seeds and we don’t want to burn it so these seeds infuse really fast and we’ll just keep shaking it around and as you can see, the seeds are starting to cook and more bubbles are starting to appear. And you can kind of judge what the color of the oil is. It’s going to start to change as you can see the back of my spoon, it’s starting to change really fast and the longer that you keep it in the more intense the flavor will be but there’s also a point where the seed will start to pop like right here and that signals that it’s going to start to be done already.
Now, from this point we’re going to take it right into our stock pot. And we’re just going to drain out all of the oil, remove the seeds and from right here you can see the color of the oil is just a beautiful color. And a lot of people used this in different types of food production for food color, and you also can use it for coloring your hair, coloring your clothes but today we chose to use it to flavor and color our soup.
And to this we’re going to add onions, this is a real simple dish. Everything just goes all in. We’re going to add celery, green bell pepper, and garlic. Now at this point, while we’re going to do this to make the vegetables and the trick to this dish and I think all Puerto Rican dishes is the amount of vegetables that you put in. The more veggies you put in and you can sweat it out the better the flavor of the soup will be.
You can see that the color of the vegetables are starting to turn from all the annatto and what we’re going to do here again is add to it as cilantro. And cilantro is a good herb for pulling mercury out of your blood and we’re going to use the oregano and we’re just going let this sweat for another—I’d say for a good 10 minutes.
Okay, right now the vegetables have nice consistency right where we want to have them and to this what we’re going to add is tomato sauce, and water. Let’s get that in the pan and we’re going to let this simmer for an hour and a half. And after that simmered, we’re going to add macaroni, kidney beans and potatoes. And we’ll adjust the flavor at that point.
Okay, we’re been having our soup simmer for the past hour and a half and so now what we’re going to do is we’re going to incorporate some kidney beans, some potatoes, and some partially cooked pasta. And we’re going to add all this to the soup and then we’ll let it simmer for another 20 or so minutes so everything can get married together and the potatoes are cooked well enough and that’s it.
Okay right about this point, our potatoes looked to be about done and we’re going to just add some salt to that and adjust it for flavor and this is Kosher salt. You can use sea salt or whatever salt you have on hand and we’re going to give a little taste, too bad you weren’t here.
Okay now our soup is just about done. We’re just going to serve it and let’s turn the fire off first. And this is a clear soup which is real common to the people in South America. And it’s almost a hearty meal. They will actually taste better the second day or just let it simmer even longer so it’s just kind of what it looks like. We have our garnish and it just smells wonderful. And again you can see the color of the oil. And that’s the Puerto Rican soup. Bye.
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