People love a secret — or the idea of it. They want to know the secret to staying healthy, say. But is there one? Or are they really asking, “Is there any way to look and feel good without the hassle of eating sensibly and exercising regularly?” You know, just in case there actually is. At any rate, no one likes being told the secret is something called self-discipline and it doesn’t come in a pill. I ought to know: I wouldn’t recognize self-discipline if it sat on my face.
But here’s a “secret” I want to let you in on: patience. When it comes to cooking, it’s what distinguishes a dish that is merely great from one that is utterly sublime. Trust me, there really is a difference. I myself found out just how much only days ago.
The occasion was my very first paella. Oh, I came prepared for that one, which was to say that it involved catching the lady of the house in a good enough mood to spring for some fancy rice, saffron, and a paellera. That accomplished (this was around the same time she bought the prosciutto), I had no doubt at all that the dish would turn out great, what with a tried-and-tested recipe, plus tips, from Marketman. His most important tip: do the sofrito right or you’re fucked. He did not state it that way, of course (he’s got class, whereas I’m just plain crass), but you get the gist.
Sofrito is the thick, slow-cooked sauce that serves as a base for many a Spanish savory dish. It’s tomato-based, with lots of onions thrown in, plus garlic, olive oil, and saffron (for the lovely color). At this point I expect someone to scoff that it’s just plain tomato sauce tarted up. There is no talking to that someone. If, on the other hand, you are the sort who wonders why I’m waxing delirious over some sauce that could just as easily be bought ready-made from the supermarket, I assure you: you will make a lot of people happy with this sauce — including people at Gasul and Pryce Gas — and you will also learn a thing or two about patience.
Patience is slicing four large white onions as thinly as possible. I hope you know how tedious that is. More than that, I hope you appreciate what slicing onions does to your lacrimal duct. I’d never shed so many tears since Jon Voight’s character died in The Champ.
Patience is sautéing the onions in half a cup of olive oil until they are caramelized and evenly browned. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But that’s underestimating the “until” part. It took two full hours of constant stirring over a low flame for the onions to reach that “evenly browned” stage. The recipe said it would take about an hour, but there’s really no arguing with those onions, was there? Instead, I found myself wondering if I had sliced them thinly enough. I killed some time over that.
Patience is stirring for another two hours after putting in four cloves of thinly sliced garlic, the saffron-infused water and five cups of diced tomatoes (I used canned). Again with the extra hour. But the recipe said to keep cooking until the mixture had reached a jam-like consistency and by Bathala’s holy whiskers I was going to achieve that consistency even if it meant another hour of my life I couldn’t get back! In fact, it took a tad longer than that because I had no immersion blender (now you know what to get me for Christmas); I had to let the mixture cool down a bit before blitzing it in a conventional blender.
And that, finally, was it. For the base, anyway. The entire process took almost five hours. I doubled the recipe, by the way, which might or might not have accounted for the longer cooking time. And why, pray, did I do that? I don’t know; I just did.
Here’s a closer look at the paella; note the rich golden color of the rice underneath all that seafood — that’s the sofrito in action.
Just for the record, I wasn’t too happy with my paella. It tasted okay — the portion that wasn’t terribly burnt did, anyway. The fault was solely mine: I went overboard with the charcoal despite explicit instructions to regulate the heat in order to avoid just such a result. Mirisi. But I’m not going to dwell on that. It’s what I did with the remaining sofrito (I made a double batch, remember?) which really inspired this post.
You see, I don’t have a personal benchmark when it comes to paella. I can’t tell one that’s good from another that has presumably been touched by the gods. However, our household prides itself on making a mean kalderetang kanding (goat stew). I’m a self-styled goat stew connoisseur, so when I tell you that using sofrito instead of store-bought tomato sauce/paste gives the stew a certain je ne sais quoi, you better take my word for it. At a loss for words to describe the dish, I actually cringed upon hearing myself say that it had “body” and “depth.” Aguy — to think that I scoff when people say that of their wines!
I’ll put it this way, then: the sauce was rich and subtly sweet, except it wasn’t the familiar sweetness of processed sugar. It was — how shall I put it? — more complex. That, I’m told, is the upshot of cooking onions slowly: It dissolves the sulfur compounds that give them zing while breaking down their natural sugars, and the result is a sauce that tastes something like idealized tomatoes, nothing like onions, and everything like a goddamn good sauce should. You can say it has complexity, or depth, or body; go ahead, but plain old tomato sauce it is not.
But where words fail, genuine appreciation takes up the slack. A friend kept coming back for more of the kaldereta until I shamed him from eating any more; it was that good. Even the hired cook, our go-to gal when it came to goat, expressed amazement that a dish she had been cooking for nearly four decades could still be improved upon. It was a wonderful lesson in culinary grace and humility.
As for the rest of the sofrito, I tried it with shrimp, crab, and fish. Sublime — all of them. I recruited friends to act as taste-testers and they all agreed that it was the next best thing to the discovery of penicillin. You should try it; your family will build an altar in your honor and friends will camp out in the front yard while the sofrito cooks. That will teach them patience. And if someone makes the mistake of asking what brand of tomato sauce you used, raise an eyebrow and deadpan, “That ain’t just tomato sauce, honey — that’s sofrito. Show some respect.”
Now go practice both.
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