Ecuadorian cuisine
Encebollado
A tuna soup with cassava and pickled onion. Ecuadorians eat it for breakfast and treat it as a hangover cure.
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 40 min
- Total
- 60 min
- Difficulty
- Easy
Ingredients
- Tuna — fresh, in one piece700 g
- Cassava — peeled, in batons700 g
- Red onion — thinly sliced2
- Tomatoes3
- Lime3
- Ground cumin2 tsp
- Coriander30 g
- Garlic4 clove
- Vegetable oil40 ml
- Salt and pepperto taste
Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.
Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.
Method
- 1
Cure the onion in the juice of two limes with salt and leave it at least fifteen minutes.
16 min
- 2
Fry the garlic and tomatoes with the cumin for five minutes, add a litre and a half of water and bring it up.
10 min
- 3
Lower in the tuna whole and poach it fifteen minutes on a low heat. Fish does not tolerate a hard boil.
17 min
- 4
Lift out the fish, strain the broth and return it to the heat. Cook the cassava in it for twenty minutes, until soft.
22 min
- 5
Flake the tuna coarsely, discarding the dark parts, and return it to the pot for two minutes.
8 min
- 6
Ladle it out and top with the cured onion and its juice and coriander. Serve with a wedge of lime.
4 min
About the dish
The fish is poached whole in a broth with cumin and then flaked. Cooking it separately makes no sense: the flavour of the soup comes from that poaching.
The onion is cured in lime juice and salt for at least fifteen minutes; it loses its bite and turns crisp. Raw onion thrown into the bowl makes a different soup entirely.
The cassava has to be soft but not collapsing. Its starch thickens the broth, and that is what separates encebollado from a plain fish soup.
Worth knowing
- — Cassava has a woody cord down the middle; pull it out before cooking. Once cooked it never softens.
- — The dark meat along a tuna's spine is bitter. Cut it away, or the bitterness spreads through the soup.
- — Chifles, green plantain crisps, come alongside. They are crumbled straight into the bowl.
Nutrition
Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.
- Calories
- 420 kcal
- Protein
- 40 g
- Fat
- 11 g
- Carbs
- 42 g
More from Ecuador
- Llapingachos — Potato cakes with cheese inside, fried in achiote oil and served with a peanut sauce.