Afritada

Chicken in a plain tomato sauce, with the potatoes fried before they go anywhere near it.

Chicken. Not vegetarian — contains chicken, fish sauce.

Ingredients

• 1.2 kg chicken thighs and drumsticks
• 2 potatoes, in 3 cm chunks
• 2 carrots, in thick coins
• 1 red bell pepper, in wide strips
• 400 g tinned chopped tomatoes
• 3 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1 onion, sliced
• 5 garlic cloves, crushed
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 350 ml water
• 4 tablespoons oil
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 bay leaves

Method

1. FRY THE POTATOES FIRST, in the oil, until the outside is gold and the middle is still raw. Lift them out. Boiled in the sauce from raw they collapse and thicken it to paste, and this sauce is meant to stay loose.
2. Brown the chicken in the same oil, skin down, 5 minutes a side. Do it in two lots. Crowded, it steams grey.
3. Onion and garlic into the fat, 3 minutes, until soft and smelling sweet rather than sharp.
4. Tomato paste in on its own for 2 minutes. It darkens from red to brick and loses the tinny edge it has straight from the tin.
5. Tinned tomatoes, water, fish sauce, pepper and bay. Chicken back in. Simmer covered 25 minutes.
6. Carrots in, 10 minutes. Potatoes back in, 5 minutes. This order is the whole trick: everything finishes at once and nothing has been in the pot long enough to go to mush.
7. Bell pepper in for the last 2 minutes only. It should still have a snap to it and still be red, not khaki.
8. Taste for fish sauce. The sauce should coat a spoon thinly and run off it, not sit on it.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Philippines · All recipes