How to Make Guanimes con Bacalao (Cornmeal Dumplings with Salt Cod)

With Puerto Rican cuisine, there's a lot of ingredients that really define the flavor. One of them is annatto and annatto oil. So these are annatto seeds, sometimes also called achiote seeds. And the way we extract the flavor from them is we're gonna combine them with a little bit of oil. We have a half cup of vegetable oil here in this small saucepan. We are gonna let these annatto seeds steep in this oil over low heat. It takes about five minutes. What we're looking for is for the oil to get that orange color. And also look for little tiny bubbles to start to formulate around those seeds. At that point, you know it's hot enough. We've kinda reached our full point of extraction over heat. You wanna make sure you pay attention to this. You don't wanna walk away, because if you walk away, it can burn and take on a really bitter flavor. All right, you see these bubbles forming around the annatto seeds. You can see how it's taking on that nice, bright orange color. We're gonna kill the heat on this, and we're gonna set it aside and let it continue to steep while that oil's still hot for another 10 minutes. Let's talk about salt cod. This is the star of the dish here. Now, this salt cod comes from a Portuguese market. So you get this nice, big, thick hunk here with a little bit of the belly attached. You see it's coated with salt. It's basically just fresh cod that's been salted and air-dried until it's nearly shelf-stable. I think people primarily still keep it in the refrigerator, but it could last for a while outside of refrigeration. So this is one way to buy it. It often comes in from the grocery store in these little boxes as well. And you can see that you still get a different variety of thicknesses. So the main difference here that we wanna focus on is the thickness. Now, this thicker piece of salt cod is gonna retain more of its salt than something thin like this, because in order to use the salt cod, we first have to soak it. But before we begin that, we wanna remove some of this exterior salt. I'm just gonna rinse it under some cold water, just really quickly trying to rinse the exterior salt off. And then we're going to submerge it in two quarts of cold water here, and then we'll cover this eventually and stick it in the refrigerator for a good 24 hours. Now, the amount of time that you soak your salt cod for is a matter of personal taste. Personally, I like it to retain some of its characteristic saltiness, but not be overpoweringly salty. This is gonna take a lot longer to soak and remove all of the saltiness than a thin portion like this. But this situation, about 24 hours will be okay. We'll change the water one time during that period. Okay, so our annatto seeds have been steeping here in the oil for a good 10 minutes. We could just drain this off. That's beautiful. Okay, so we can let our annatto oil set aside until we're ready to use it later on, cover our salt cod, and we're gonna refrigerate it for a good 24 hours, changing the water one time. Not sure what to make tonight? We have an app for that. That's right. Our app gives you exclusive access to thousands of recipes and reviews from Cook's Country and the entire America's Test Kitchen family. You'll also get exclusive access to helpful step-by-step videos and have the ability to stream every season of Cook's Country ad-free, without interruptions like this, anywhere, anytime on any mobile device. For a more personalized experience, our app also allows you to search by ingredients, set dietary preferences, save recipes, and make notes along the way. Scan the QR code or visit the app store to keep Cook's Country in the palm of your hand. Our salt cod has been soaking for 24 hours. You can see how plush and soft it is now compared to where it started. I have two quarts of water here. We're gonna bring this up to a boil over high heat. Then we'll reduce the heat to medium and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Okay, our salt cod has been simmering for 10 minutes. We can kill the heat. We wanna use some of this salt cod cooking water as a base for our baklava. So we're gonna remove about a cup of it. All right, so now we can remove our cod from our cooking liquid here. If we were gonna shred this with our hands, we would let it cool down in five to 10 minutes, but I'm gonna use a potato masher. I'm just gonna give this some brute force mashing right here. So we'll just go ahead and keep mashing this up until it's all nice and finely shredded. Okay, so looking for any bones and removing any pieces of skin with our fingers. Piece of skin like this right here. Just chuck that off to the side. Okay, so our salt cod is nice and finely shredded. We'll just cover it up and throw it in the fridge and let it sit until we're ready to proceed with the rest of our stew. We are ready to start making our salt cod stew. So I have a quarter cup of our annatto oil, our beautiful annatto oil. I'm just gonna begin heating that up in a 12-inch nonstick skillet, medium-low heat until it starts to shimmer. While that's going on, we could talk about peppers. So there are two peppers that are used commonly in Puerto Rican cooking. One is a cubanel, which you will find often in grocery stores here. Stem and seed this pepper. So long, I'm just gonna cut it in half. Remove some of the white ribs and the seed pods here. I always cut the peppers with the skin on the bottom because it's easier to cut into the fleshy side of the pepper. I totally agree. Just slice these thin. The other pepper that we're gonna be using today and it's used commonly in Puerto Rican cooking is called ajis dulces, or sweet peppers. Now they look a lot like habaneros and scotch bonnet peppers. We could be victims of pranks here, but I don't think these are habaneros or scotch bonnets. But they add a ton of flavor and they're really unique. If you can't find these, you could substitute a half cup of chopped red bell pepper, but, and the dish will still be great. It'll just taste a little different. Okay, so what I like to do is I like to begin by just cutting off the bottom of the pepper because that's gonna be a little bit bigger piece. I just cut that in half. But other than that, I just go right around with the center seed pod. For our purposes, this is about the right size. So our oil is nice and hot and shimmering. We can go ahead and add all of our peppers. So we'll add our cubanelles. Okay, and we can add our half cup of chopped ajis dulces. Also going to add two and a quarter cups of chopped onion. We're gonna add five minced garlic cloves. So even though we're using salt cod, we still need to season the rest of the stew. Okay, so we're just gonna add three quarters of teaspoon of table salt, half a teaspoon of dried oregano. And we're gonna let this cook until the vegetables are nice and soft. And that takes about seven minutes. Okay, it's been seven minutes. You can see how the vegetables are nice and softened. The peppers, I always tell her the peppers just start to bend like that. So we're gonna add two tablespoons of tomato paste at this point. Just gonna stir that in there and let it cook. It kind of removes some of this raw flavor. Just let it cook for about a minute. Now we can add our reserved cod cooking water and all of our shredded salt cod. Just stir this in. We're gonna reduce the heat to low, throw a lid on it, and we're gonna let this simmer away for 15 minutes for those flavors to blend. It's beautiful. Okay, our stew has been simmering away for 15 minutes. God, you smell that? Smells delicious. So we're gonna kill the heat on this. And we have ricao, also called culantro. It's like a blend of really strong parsley and a little bit of cilantro. So we're gonna add about a third of a cup of chopped culantro. If you can't find culantro or ricao, you can do a mix of half cilantro and half parsley. So this is about a third of a cup. We'll add this to our stew. So we're gonna add a quarter cup thinly sliced pimento stuffed olives. That's about a quarter cup right there. Just look how pretty that is. It's very pretty. So we can just let this sit off to the side and we can clean up and come back and start making our guanines. Now it's time to make our guanines, which are our cornmeal dumplings. And this is something that varies throughout the island. The version we're gonna make today is just simply cornmeal, water, and a little bit of salt. So I have one and a half cups of water with three quarters of a teaspoon of table salt. That's coming to a boil here. And this is six and a quarter ounces of fine yellow cornmeal. As soon as this water comes to a boil, we're just gonna go ahead and dump our cornmeal in there. We can kill the heat. I just wanna stir this together. And as you see, it'll start to set up very quickly. Really trying to stir it enough to get the lumps out. And this is really what we're looking for. Okay, so we're gonna give this about three to five minutes to cool down so we can use our hands to shape the balls. Now our guanines dough here has cooled for a minute. We could go ahead and start portioning it out. We'll get about 20 heaping tablespoon portions out of this. All right, and we'll keep on portioning this out until we get our 20 even portions. And then we'll roll them between our hands and make them nice and smooth. So it helps if you wet your hands a little bit. So give them a little squeeze and then just kind of roll them like this. Adorable those are. They are adorable. The water really helps, right? Yes, it did. All right, so these are ready to be boiled. So I have three quarts of water that's come to a boil here. And because it's just you and I dining here today, we're gonna cook off 10 of our dumplings. So we each get five. So we'll drop these into the water and we'll let those go for about five minutes. And you can tell when they're done because they start to float. And while our guanines are cooking, we can go ahead and start warming up our bacalao over low heat so it's nice and hot. You can see our guanines are starting to float and circulate through the water. It means they're ready so we could shut the heat off. All right, so we each get five. All right, now we can bring in our bacalao. It's been heating up. It's just gorgeous. It smells wonderful too, doesn't it? Just pour that right over top of our guanines. All right, so we have one more ingredient we're going to add. You remember our annatto oil from earlier. So the version that we had at Casa Vieja had a really luscious kind of decadent slick of annatto oil all over it. And rather than cooking in a ton of annatto oil, we're just saving some of it here for a little bit of a garnish at the end. You ready to dig in? I'm ready. You want to do this? So the way you do it is you cut open one of these guanines. You get a little bit of the bacalao on your spoon like that. Throw the oil. My goodness, it's really, really good. When I had this dish, I was completely blown away. I mean, it's so simple, but it's really deep and complex. And it's not all about the salt cod. I mean, you get the peppers, the annatto oil, the racao. They all play really nicely with each other. We hope you enjoyed this video and tune in for more. Hit those like and subscribe buttons so you never miss a single one. And if you're ready to take your cooking to the next level, try our digital all-access membership where you can stream every season of Cook's Country anytime, anywhere, and always ad-free. 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