Arepas Made with Nixtamalised Rice and Filled with Bacalhau à Brás
Venezuela's corn cake made instead from rice treated with lime in the Mexican manner, so it holds and browns like corn, then split and stuffed with Portugal's scrambled salt cod. A sandwich that does not exist anywhere in the Atlantic, from a kitchen that thinks it should.
- 400 g jasmine rice
- 4 g food-grade calcium hydroxide (cal)
- Salt
- For the filling: 300 g salt cod, soaked 24 hours, flaked
- 1 large onion, thinly sliced
- 2 potatoes, cut into matchsticks and fried crisp
- 4 eggs, beaten
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- Black olives, parsley, pepper
- Dissolve the cal in 1.5 litres of water, add the rice, simmer 20 minutes, cover and rest 1 hour. Rinse thoroughly under running water, rubbing the grains.
- Blend the rice with a little water and a pinch of salt to a soft, cohesive dough. Rest 20 minutes.
- Shape into 8 discs 1.5 cm thick. Griddle over medium heat 8 minutes per side until crusted and hollow-sounding.
- Soften the onion in the oil, add the cod and warm through. Add the fried potatoes, pour in the eggs, and stir gently off the heat until just creamy. Add olives, parsley and pepper.
- Split the hot arepas and fill generously. Serve at once.
Nixtamalisation is the ancient Mexican process of cooking corn in an alkaline lime solution, which loosens the hull, releases nutrients and gives masa its unmistakable flavour and pliability. Almost nobody nixtamalises rice, because there is no reason to, until you want a rice flour dough that behaves like corn masa. Our kitchen tried it and found that jasmine rice cooked in a weak lime solution, rinsed, and ground wet produces a dough that shapes into arepas, holds together on the griddle and develops a crust with a faint, mineral, tortilla-like flavour, while the interior stays tender and tastes cleanly of rice.
The filling is Portuguese: bacalhau à Brás, salt cod flaked and scrambled with soft onion, matchstick potatoes fried crisp, eggs barely set, black olives and parsley. It is one of Lisbon's great comfort dishes and it has never been put inside an arepa. Split hot from the griddle, the rice arepa is filled with the warm, creamy cod mixture and eaten immediately, before the potatoes lose their crunch.
On the nixtamal
Use food-grade calcium hydroxide, cal, at one percent of the rice's weight in enough water to cover. Simmer 20 minutes, rest an hour, rinse very well, then grind in a food processor with a little water to a soft dough. It should feel like play dough and smell faintly of lime and popcorn. If it cracks when shaped, add water a spoon at a time.
Serve two per person with a sharp green salad and a glass of cold Vinho Verde. The next morning, leftover arepas split and toasted under a fried egg are, we can report, the best hangover cure our kitchen has produced.
