Encebollado (Tuna and Cassava Soup under Raw Red Onion)

Variations

• Encebollado mixto: prawns or squid added. Put them in for a minute or two after the tuna comes out.
• The fish: albacore is the standard and any tuna does. A white fish works too, but it gives the broth far less body, so pour in a little more of the cassava water.
• Unlimed onion: plenty of cooks simply heap it on raw. The sharpness goes into the broth and the first spoonful is much fiercer.
• Chifles crumbled in: they soften in the bowl and add body. Keep them beside it if you want the crunch.
• Breakfast: ko.wikipedia records it as a breakfast dish and a common hangover cure, and notes it is bought on the street rather than made at home.

Tips

• Not throwing the strained solids away is the whole dish. Stocks and broths closes the question of how long each ingredient wants with a table, and even its worked example discards what has given up its flavour — "Beef bones can buy depth with four hours; fish cannot." So ukha buys its depth with "cheap small fish simmered 25 minutes and then thrown away, with the fish you actually eat going in for ten. The discarded fish is closer to a seasoning than an ingredient." This pot does the reverse: the tomato, onion and garlic that came out of the broth are blended, pushed back through the sieve and returned to it.
• The licence for that is in the same table. It gives fish bones "Beyond that you get bitterness and a fishy edge.", and vegetables "Longer and the sweetness collapses into something earthy." So the ceiling the fish imposes is shorter than the time the vegetables want. Aromatics that leave the pan after fifteen minutes are not spent, they are half spent, which is exactly why they are worth blending rather than binning. You could not do this to the contents of a four-hour beef pot.
• A cloudy broth is correct here. There is a puree in it, so it is opaque and drags slightly on the spoon. A fish soup built around clarity is a different object from the first step onwards.
• Boiling the cassava apart is pot-au-feu's move with the opposite aim. That page sends its potatoes to another pan because "Their starch undoes three hours of clarity in ten minutes." Starch loose in the broth is a loss there and a gain here, which is why the cassava water is poured in rather than tipped out.
• What that water does is what pasta water does. Bryndzove halusky keeps its cooking water and says "It does the same job as pasta water — loosened with it, the sauce clings to the dumplings instead of sliding off." Here it lends body to a broth instead of making a sauce cling.
• The onion never goes in the pan. The name means "onioned", and that onion is never boiled. Heaped in the bowl with hot broth poured over it, only the outside wilts and the inside stays raw. Liming it first is ceviche's reason — acid rather than heat changing the surface.
• Cassava wants to be cooked exactly, not lightly. Under-done it stays hard and acrid; over-done it dissolves into the broth and disappears. Lift it the moment a skewer goes in, and pull out the woody cord through the middle, which no amount of boiling softens.
• Taking the tuna out first is how you keep it. It goes on cooking after it has given the broth its body, and past fifteen minutes the flakes break up and scatter, leaving nothing to pull apart in the bowl.