Leo delivers produce to Open Produce from Hyde Park Produce four days a week – we’ve got a great, jovial relationship, and he complains about me in Spanish, to my face, on a regular basis. I just smile and continue working, then give him crap. I asked him what Mexican-Americans have for Thanksgiving, and he said tamales and pozole. What’s pozole? A delicious pork and hominy soup. I researched online, asked Cristina for a real Mexican version, and combined all of my results into a bastardized version that is still sitting in my fridge because it made SO MUCH. (Also, it’s pretty oily and heavy, but Cristina also just stated the obvious, that now that its cold I can easily just scrape the fat off the top before I eat it again. Hooray!)
Ingredients:
2 lb pork shoulder, cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces, rubbed with salt and pepper
1/2 white onion, chopped
1/2 yellow onion, chopped
1 can hominy/posole (29 oz)
1/2 lime, quartered
4 crushed garlic cloves
2 guajillo peppers, reconstituted and chopped (it should have been pureed, but I don’t have a blender or food processor)
4 T olive oil
3 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
for garnish: lime slices, avocado, yellow onion, red pepper flakes
Soak hominy with quartered lime and 4 crushed garlic cloves in hot water. (Boil it if you use dried hominy, like you would dried chickpeas or beans.) Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a deep pan, saute garlic and guajillo peppers, and sear the meat, taking care to not crowd the pan. This is apparently against Mexican rules. You’re supposed to just stew it, and not add garlic or salt and pepper, but that sounds bland to me.
I then added the onion to the pan with all of the pork, about 5 cups of water, and the drained hominy. Let it all simmer away! The longer the better, so the pork gets really tender and the flavors all blend together well. Serve garnished with lime, avocado, onion, radish…the list goes on, depending on traditions and tastes. Yum.
I talked to Cristina and Leo afterwards, and it sounds like I went wrong in three places. First, I assumed it’s supposed to be a spicy soup. It’s not. I added Turkish red pepper flakes and the garlic to make it spicier. Which was delicious, but apparently not traditional. Second, you’re supposed to purée the pepper and strain everything in the broth (so the limes the hominy was cooked in, the onions and garlic, and the pureed pepper) so you end up pretty much with pork and hominy in a bright red broth. I couldn’t do this because I can’t puree, and I like a chunky soup so I didn’t really want to get rid of the onions and garlic and all the other good stuff. But I see the advantage, because now the soup looks really messy and it doesn’t feel like something that should be garnished at serving. The third place I went wrong was with my pepper choice. Cristina’s recipe called for chilacate peppers, which they didn’t have at Hyde Park Produce. I asked the guys there, however (they all know me, and followed me around the store making sure I found the other pozole ingredients alright), and they stood in a crowd around the peppers discussing in Spanish before selecting guajillo from their frankly meagre selection. Leo later said I should have used a combination of guajillo and ancho. Ah, well. As long as it’s red.
Leo also said there are three different kinds of pozole, depending on where in Mexico you’re from: green, red, and white. There are differences between all of them – white has peanuts in it, I think – but he didn’t really know the details. A task for the future…
Also, I think I need to invest in a blender.
