domingo, 15 de junio de 2014

Potas en salsa Canary Islands recipe

The potas in salsa are a traditional Canary Island dish, coming from fishermen's traditions. As usual for this kind of dishes, every house or every neighborhood cook it differently, and I'm no exception, and I'm gonna tell you my family's recipe. 

The pota is a kind of mollusk (or a cephalopod, since it has no shell) very similar to squids, but it's cheaper and not so well known, but it's just perfect for many delighful dishes. The quality of the flesh may be somehow inferior in quality, when compared with the squids, but when it's well cooked, the result will be super tasty!

In Canary Islands potas are a very common dish, especially when cooked in sauce. I remember that even not so many years ago (and still today, once in a while) fishermen used to came in my neighborhood to sell potas, yelling "potasss! fresh potasss! very tasty potasss!", and everyone come off to buy the potas they'd fished the night before. That's one of its characteristics: it's fished by night and in high sea.

The potas can be cooked in the same ways as squids or calamari, which makes them great for the children (and not only!) since they've no bones. Nutritionally talking the pota it's very interesting too, since it has a lot of proteins and the fats it has are very healthy, and even if it has 190 mg. of cholesterol for every 100 grams of flesh, its flesh does not makes that the cholesterol in our blood grows as other meals, and it even helps lowering the levels of cholesterol because of the kind of fats it has. Potas are very rich in vitamines and minerals like phosphorus, potassium and magnesium. So, let's eat potas! You can eat all you want as long as you eat the right quantity!

This kind of recipe is very versatile, we can prepare more than we need and what we don't eat we can use in many others preparations! Take advantage of it, you'll save time and money. And beside that, it's a dish with easy and cheap ingredients. Less is more!

  • 1 y 1/2 kg aprox. of Potas.
  • 1 red pepper
  • 1 big onion
  • 3 garlic finger
  • 3 or 4 sauce tomato
  • 1 spoonful of sweet pimenton (spanish paprika)
  • 2 leaves of laurel
  • 2 glasses of white wine ( aproximately)
  • 5 or 6 spoonful of olive oil
  • Salt (to taste)

1- Clean the potas and cut it as you prefer. I do not take off the skin when I cook it, because it adds a flavour to the sauce, but that's a matter of tastes.

2- Put a pot heating, add olive oil, minced onion, just like to make a soffritto. When it starts becoming somehow fried, we add the minced garlic, the minced pepper and we continue frying it. When it's halfway through the frying process, we add at last tomatoes cut into pieces and previously peeled.

3- When we're done with our fry, we add the potas, we stir them a little bit, we add the spanish paprika, known as pimenton, the laurel and the white wine. What I told you is an approximate quantity, and you maybe should add some more wine during the cooking.
Let cook our potas with the pot covered for about 50 minutes (we can check it out when the potas are ready seeing if the tentacles are soft, since they're the hardest part of the pota, if they're soft, then the pota is cooked). If we see that the flesh still isn't enough cooked but the sauce has dried a lot or it's sticking too much, we shall add some more wine, but never water! In this way, it will result a lot tastier. At this phase, we'll try the salt, and that because this kind of mollusks tend to be somehow salty, and in this way we avoid the risk of having a dish that's too much salted. If we thikn it needs it, then we'll add some sea salt, we'll stir it and we'll keep cooking it...chup chup chup!

4- When we think that our potas are ready, we'll let them cooking some minute more, so to let the sauce "stick" to the bottom of the pot, which will add a toasted touch that's very tasty, but be careful in this phase or you'll burn it!

The classical dish would be potas en salsa to be eaten with some delicious papas arrugadas, or boiled, or even mashed potatoes.

It's a delicious dish, and it's very versatile too, since we can use it to make rice with potas, and the rice with the tasty sauce it's just wow! We can also use it to fill empanadas and so on. Of course, we can freeze it and conserve it for any occasion.

I suggest you, for example, to eat the potas you've left with rice, the following day. Sometimes I just cook potas in salsa to eat it directly with the rice, nom nom!).

To do so, you just need to add to the same pot you've used to cook the potas left some rice and water (we'll add two times more water than rice, but that's depends on how dry your sauce is. If it's too liquid, we can low the quantity of water). We can add a little bit of curcuma too, to give it the typical yellow colour without using colorants, and ejoying the many benefit that curcuma gives us! We add salt to taste, we cook it and when the rice is ready...there you have it! Here you are a delicious and super tasty rice dish!

Of course we can add olives, peas or whatever we want to our rice, but the great thing here is to make something easy, with just some ingredients and obtain a delicious dish!

Enjoy your meal!

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