Arroz con pollo (Puerto Rican rice with chicken)featured
Arroz con pollo, chicken cooked and rice cooked together with a fragrant sofrito base, tomato sauce, garlic, warm spices, and briny olives and capers. The perfect, quick one-pot family meal.
Every culture has their go-to one-pot protein and rice dish. Whether its South Asian biryani, Palestinian maqlouba, or Cajun jambalaya, these dishes are comforting favourites. For Puerto Ricans, it’s arroz con pollo, rice with chicken. So it’s a dish I’ve added to my repertoire to cook for my Egypto-Rican family, and we all love it.
Making arroz con pollo
This dish, like so many Puerto Rican dishes, starts with sofrito— A mixture of herbs, peppers, onions and garlic that form the flavour base for Puerto Rican dishes and give them their distinct taste. Check out my recipe for how to make your own sofrito for the best tasting results.
This recipe begins by frying some of this herbaceous sofrito until it releases its beautiful fragrance. While some of the ingredients will need to be obtained in Latin or West Indian markets, I offer some substitution suggestions for those. It’s really easy to whip up a batch and freeze for future use.
While it won’t be quite as tasty, you can use store-bought sofrito, or heed my substitution advice below to (very) finely mince some onion, garlic, sweet pepper and cilantro to give a similar taste.
Once you’ve fried your sofrito, you will simply add the remaining ingredients, sauteing each addition before adding the next to build layers of flavour. In this version I used frozen green pigeon peas, gandules verdes in Spanish. You can use canned gandules or substitute regular green peas.
Cook up your one-pot wonder and serve with a little salad, if you’d like, for a great comforting dish the whole family will love.
¡Buen provecho!
Arroz con pollo (Puerto Rican rice and chicken)
Ingredients
- 4 tbsp neutral oil or preferably, achiote oil
- 4 tbsp sofrito if you don't have sofrito, substitute a mixture of finely minced onion, garlic, sweet peppers, cilantro
- 3-4 lbs chicken parts I prefer skin-on, bone-in drums and thighs but you can use whichever parts you like
- kosher salt and pepper
- 1 onion coarsely chopped
- 2 tsp cumin ground
- 1 tsp coriander ground
- 1 tsp paprika
- 1/2 cup mixed pitted or stuffed manzanilla olives and capers (sold together as alcaparrado)
- 3 tbsp tomato paste
- 14 oz frozen or canned green pigeon peas (gandules verdes) if you can't find, substitute green peas
- 3 cups medium grain rice washed well
Instructions
- Heat oil in large pot over high heat.
- Season chicken parts liberally with salt and pepper. Sear chicken until skins are golden and crisp. Do not crowd pot, and sear in batches if necessary. Beware of splattering oil, use a splatter screen if you have one. Remove chicken.
- Turn down to medium-high. Fry sofrito for a few minutes until very fragrant.
- Add coarsely chopped onion and spices. Saute until onions are soft.
- Add alcaparrado/ olives and capers and saute.
- Add tomato paste and fry 3-4 minutes.
- Add peas and mix thoroughly.
- Add washed rice and mix thoroughly until well-coated with tomato and seasonings. Add salt to taste (about 1.5btsp if using kosher crystal salt). Toast rice for 3-4 minutes, continually stirring and scrapping down sides of pot.
- Add chicken back to pot and mix well into rice. Smooth out the top of rice.
- Add water to cover rice by about 1/2 an inch, or about 1 cm. It's ok if chicken pokes out above water but make sure rice grains are all submerged.
- Turn up heat and bring to a boil. Cover pot with foil to create airtight seal and cover with lid. Turn down heat to medium-low. Simmer for 35- 40 minutes, turn off heat and let sit another ten minutes covered before serving.
