November 7, 2023

Arroz Verde (Green Rice)

Name: Arroz Verde (Green Rice)
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 30 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Mexican
Ingredients: 1 cup rice; 2 cups stock; ¼ onion, finely diced; Kernels from 1 corn cob; 2-3 poblano chiles; 1 handful coriander; ¼ onion; 2 garlic cloves; 1/4 onion fine diced; 1 serrano chilli; Salt to taste (if needed)

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This recipe uses an interesting technique that brings a tonne of flavour from just a few fresh everyday ingredients.

Recipe Breakdown

1 cup of rinsed rice and 2 cups of vegetable stock, you can use whatever stock you like.

For the aromatics, we have a quarter of a white onion finely diced, the kernels from 1 head of corn and a serrano chilli.

We’re also going to make a paste from the following fresh ingredients, we have 2 cloves of garlic, another 1/4 of a white onion, 2 poblano chillies and a handful of coriander.

ingredients on a chopping board, garlic, onion, coriander, poblano pepper

Method

To get started, into a food processor add the poblano chillies that are just deseeded and cut a little smaller, the white onion, 2 cloves of garlic peeled, the coriander and a splash of water around 20ml or half a shot glass.

Blend that until you have a reasonably smooth puree, it doesn’t have to be baby food smooth.

Next preheat your pan with a splash of neutral tasting oil, add the rinsed rice and fry for around a minute occasionally stirring.

Then add diced white onion and the corn, and continue to fry for 2 to 3 more minutes until the rice and vegetables are starting to look golden brown in places.

Next, add the paste we made earlier and continue to fry whilst regularly stirring, you want to cook a lot of the moisture out of the paste at this stage to intensify its flavour. Now add the vegetable stock and season with salt if needed, this stock im using is salty enough so I don’t need to add any more.

If you want a little spice then add the fresh serrano chilli at this stage, just make a small incision in the skin, lid on and simmer for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes I like to give this recipe more of a mix to get the paste that’s risen to the top mixed with the rice a bit more, lid back on gently cook for another 5 minutes, then heat off and rest for 5 more minutes, exactly the same as the previous recipe.

This is such a delicious plate of rice it’s one of those recipes that when you make it from scratch like this, it just makes you nod with approval when you eat it.

Key Moments

So for me, the key moments of this recipe are –

Why fry the paste?

Frying the paste does 2 things. It brings out the flavours of those spices, kind of wakes them up, without doing this the recipe will taste a bit flat, like it’s missing something.

Frying the paste also removes some of the water content. We don’t really know how much water is in this paste, we could google it and try and work it out, then do some equations and subtract the amount of water from the recipe blah blah blah…. but that’s a bit extreme.

This brings me onto why we fried the rice a bit longer in this recipe, by frying it harder we’ve locked more of the starch to the rice, which makes it more forgiving to cook.

This means it can take a little extra water content from the paste and not come out the other side completely stodgy and overcooked.

By piercing the chilli with a knife you help it release its flavour straight away and this also stops it from exploding and getting its seeds all over your rice.

This recipe is a great option for kids, probably minus the chilli though, it’s a great way of sneaking some veg into your children’s diet in a tasty way.

There are enough flavours going on in this recipe that you can simply serve it with a grilled piece of chicken or piece of fish and a simple salad for a nutritionally complete meal.

Yield: 4 portions