Sun 22 Feb, 2009
I’ve been talking big about making pozole for a long time, especially considering how many people were offering to help me make it. Pozole is a mexican pork-hominy (white corn) soup that is really tasty. Unfortunately, every recipe I was reading online seemed to indicate that it would take a really long time to cook, starting with the infamous line “boil the pig’s head for three hours“, but really it seemed that I needed to start the night before, or at least soak the hominy. Some web pages talk of shucking the corn yourself; I was thinking to buy the dried hominy and just soak it over night, but really what ended up happening is I’m at the market three hours before dinner is meant to be on, my friend says we can do it, and I’m not quite convinced, but let’s do it–after all, using a can does take a lot less time.
Also, in all this, I learned how to make a salsa! That will appear lower down. First the pozole. This comes in three parts: boil the hominy, boil the pork, and put out lots of condiments (this is where the salsa comes in).
For the main ingredients, they are simply
- A humongous can of hominy (also called pozole (both the dish and the grain are called pozole), white corn, maiz blanco)
- A pound of pork shoulder
- Sal mucha, er, lots of salt. We actually didn’t use as much as the original recipe said.
- Some ground cumin
- A head of garlic, all peeled, for each pot (this turns out to be two)
For the condiments, we used:
- A bunch of radishes, chopped into small parts
- A bunch of green cabbage, chopped into bits small enough to add to soup
- Chopped white onions
- Key limes, chopped (and large discussion over what are limes and lemons are, and how they are said in differing languages)
- tortilla chips
- The aforementioned salsa, which will be detailed below.
For the condiments, just put everything in bowls, and set out to let people customize thier soup.
For the hominy, dump the contents of the can in a large soup pot, add salt, cumin and a head of garlic, and set to boil. Once it gets boiling, turn it down so it stays hot and simmering for two hours.
For the pork, put in another large soup pot, with enough water to boil it, put in a head of garlic and some salt, and again, cook for two hours.
Once the pork is done (it will change color), take it out, and dump the broth into the pozole pot. Then pull the pork, that is, pull the pork into little pieces. Put the pork out as if it were a condiment too.
Ah, how can I forget abuela’s secret part of the recipe? The big secret, I was informed, was after things are cooked but not quite before you are done, pull the garlic out, mush it up until it is a paste, and stir it back into the soup.
Now here, the soup is done, and it’s basically a “build your own soup”. Put as much meat and other condiments as you want in a bowl, and cover with soup! My take on this is that it’s not a soup! I wanted to throw the meat and salsa into the same pot, and let people’s luck determine how much they get. I was willing to concede on the rest because it would substantially alter the crunchiness of veggies if they were soaking in the soup. The mexicans managed to convince me that it would not be authentic enough if we did that, and even americans were smart enough to be able to make their own soups.
To make the salsa, we use the following ingredients:
- 50 grams of arbol chilis, with the stems carefully removed
- A cup of wine vinegar
- Some salt
- Only about half or less of a head of garlic
- Enough water to boil the chilis in
Boil the chilis for 20 minutes with the garlic. After you are done, dump some (not all!) of the water, add the vinegar, put in a blender, and spin. Now I have to point out, from experience, be careful doing this. I had everything in the blender, put the lid on, blend–and the lid came right off and went everywhere. Thinking it was just a matter of not holding the lid down hard enough, I tried again–the lid came off, and I got salsa all over my face. All I can say is that it is a good thing I wear glasses. While I was washing my face off, someone else managed to get the salsa blended, but be careful–my suspicion is that hot water makes the seals on the blender not as tight and the lid a lot harder to hold down. After blending, strain the seeds out, and there is a lot of liquid in the chili mush–we have a nice colander that we filtered it through, then “squished” the chili mush to get more liquid out. I saved the remaining mush to for further spicy experiments and put the salsa out with thre rest of the condiments. Yummy!
I also added a spinach salad to this. Since I make spinach salads so commonly in the winter, I am not going to detail it here, however, I will note that I added many of the “condiments” to the salad. Furthermore, some of us were just adding the salad to the soup as if it were yet another condiment.
The soup was fabulous! I want to thank all the people for helping me make it. More importantly, I want to thank them for not letting me dump the salsa into the broth, as I don’t think anyone would have eaten it. It was well reviewed all around, and further, someone brought home made pie and ice cream for dessert! Oh my gosh this stuff is wonderful.
Steel Phoenix says:
That sounds good. Was it really garlicky? I love the idea of soup with condiments. I make something that might fit the description, but it is more about the mix at the last minute part than the choice of ingredients. I’m surprised there aren’t more recipes that mix hot soup with condiment stuffs, it works really well.
You found the Arbols fresh or used them dried? I’ve only seen them dried here I think.
stanza says:
It was not too garlicky, despite what you might think! I thought it would be heavily garlicky considering how much went in it, but it may have been distributed over a lot of soup.
When we did the split pea soup, we had some of the ham left out, which people put into soup in a very similar manner, though at the time I hadn’t thought of it as “condiments”.
The arbols were dried. Boiling them made them less dry, but they certainly started dry.
Kristy says:
Nice work! I’ll have to do a cross post on this one ;)
Tabira says:
Wonderfull…