Sopa Seca de Fideo: Toasted Pasta with Mushroom, Roasted Tomato and Two Chiles

hello to all of my youtube subscribers out there the video that you're about to watch for fideo secos is exactly the type of content you'll find on my member channel now we're posting brand new recipe videos every single week and if you want access to all the member perks you have to hit the join button don't see the button i'll post a link in the comments below thank you so much for watching [Music] hey welcome back to my kitchen and thank you so much for joining me today we're going to talk about pasta in the mexican kitchen and you may think there is no pasta in the mexican kitchen but i'm here to tell you that there is and there's really classic dishes that are made from it but it's this pasta that i have in front of me it's called a fidel um and it is always in the dried form and i'm going to show you how to make the second most popular version of fideos um in in the mexican kitchen um this one is called a sopa seca de fideo or a dry soup of fidels and it's only sick or dry by comparison to the most common use for these videos and that is in sopa de fideos that is a dish that every mexican mother makes and every mexican kid eats it's just this rich brothy tomatoey soup that has these vermicelli noodles or videos in it now when you see mexican when you see pasta in the mexican kitchen you will see them doing something completely different than what you probably think about if you make pasta in the italian style you just dump these into boiling salted boiling water water right and you boil them but that's not what we're going to do today and in fact if you go to look at how the mexican kitchen produces rice we're going to follow some of those same steps so instead of just boiling rice they fry the rice first instead of just boiling the fideos in mexico they toast the fideos first and usually they do that in a fair amount of oil in a skillet just the way they would do rice but i've got another way of doing it here i'm spreading them on a baking sheet i find this way way easier and then just spray them liberally with oil i have this olive oil spray here and you want to coat them nicely so that they will brown or toast evenly and then i'm going to slide them into a 375 degree oven and we're going to watch them but it'll take some place around eight minutes or so for them to toast nicely so i'm going to slide them in here and check my temperature there that's what it is i thought i would show you the package of what these are like when you go looking for them in the mexican grocery store of course you can just get vermicelli dried vermicelli noodles in any grocery store pretty much but these are in little coils and they used to sell them in 10 ounce packages and so that's what i wrote the recipe for but this is a slightly smaller size so you just have to kind of estimate what 10 ounces would be of those guys so we'll get rid of over there and we're going to start making the base of the sauce here i'm going to heat up my large scale now you're going to need a 12-inch skillet to do this because unlike the italian kitchen you're going to put the toasted vermicelli directly in the sauce and cook it that way now when you taste these noodles you will be really surprised at the i call it buoyancy that they have they're not soft exactly like a boiled noodle in an italian preparation but they have this sort of little bounciness to them that i just think is absolutely wonderful so this dish is a dish that brings to people's minds this sort of luscious preparation of tomatoes and cream and cheese and all the good stuff topped with some avocado often times some chorizo sausage maybe goes on there um and a handful of cilantro leaves but i'm going to show you a slightly different preparation it's going to be satisfying the same way but it's going to take us down a slightly different path this one's going to be focused on the flavor of some of the mushrooms here so i'm going to grab my knife here and we'll talk about these mushrooms i have oyster mushrooms and you usually just break them apart sometimes they'll come all broken apart there is a base that we will want to kind of get off of these at the bottom it's not very tough it's not like the stems of shiitake mushrooms but i want to cut these crosswise into about quarter inch pieces and that way they'll work nicely with the strings of the vermicelli noodles so we'll cut those guys up and then we want to saute these with a an onion so i have my onion already cleaned of the exterior i'm not going to use the the bases of them for this preparation but you could if you wanted to you would just cut them really thin and so for these guys i'm going to make sure that i've got the base off of that and then just cut crosswise here and my pan now is over a kind of medium high heat which is where i want it to be and we're going to toss everything in there and keep it moving in the pan again i'm doing quarter inch here until these onions start to to brown okay so in we'll go enough oil to coat the bottom of this pan nicely i'm using by the way and you see me use this all the time baja precious olive oil so these are olives that are grown in baja um it's an area that's great for for growing olives and this is a combination of mission and nevadillo olives mission were brought there back in the 1500s and nevadillo slightly after that but i got enough oil in here to coat the bottom of the pan so liberally it'll take about three tablespoons to do that so we'll put all of this good stuff in here and just toss it until it or stir it a lot of times when i'm working with a different kind of skillet than this straight sided cast iron one i'll just toss it around in the pan but you can't do that very well with this kind of a skillet so we'll have to stir it but while the this is starting to cook now i i'm going to prepare uh the two what the sauce base and then another one of the chilies that's going to go in here so um i have these pasilla chili's now if you're confused sometimes when you go to the grocery store and you see a chili that does not look like this one called a pasilla it is probably an ancho chili because in some parts of mexico they call the ancho chile apacia but this one they will call a pasia negro okay but it's the long black looking one and for this preparation i want to cut it in to little strips now this takes a fair amount of pressure to cut through the chili skins and i usually do this some people like to do this with scissors but i actually find that harder to do so i just kind of put some body weight into it and you can see that i didn't open these up and cut take this seeds or anything out of them there we go with that because i can just toss it and get most of the seeds out of it i've got one more to do here so you want to you're using a lot of pressure so you want to make sure you're always keeping your non-dominant hand curve with the fingers curved under like that okay now we're going to toss it up like this and let the seeds fall out and then those are going to go into this skillet once we see that the onions are browning nicely okay you see that see how easy that is and it goes so much faster for me and now we're going to make the sauce base for this and instead of working with fresh tomatoes for all of this especially because i'm right now in the middle of dead middle of winter here in chicago and yes we do have some good hot house tomatoes grown here and i've touted them a number of times but i find more consistency in a can of fire roasted tomatoes so i'm going to make the base of this sauce we're gonna use two cans one and these are diced uh one will go in here um whole and the other where the pieces and one will go in a puree form so i with to this i'm going to add our second chili so the second chili here is chipotle and i really like the flavor of the canned chipotle here and a couple of them will be nice and you can always adjust the quantity that you put in of these two i'm going to put just a spoonful of that juice and that first one was so small if there's another small one or a piece of a small one then i'm going to get that in there there we go okay now i am going to put the let's take a look at those videos too i'm going to make a pure out of puree out of that but i'll come back to it again in a second so let's see what these videos look like in here i think they're just about ready okay so i'll show these to you but i'm going to leave them in for two more minutes this is what we want them to look like is the brown of that all the way through there so i'll slide them back in for a couple more minutes and then we've got some browning now starting on these these onions so this is the moment then that i will add the pastilla chili to it and by the way if you can't find the pastilla chilies you could just add more chipotle to it i just love what they add to this dish though so that's why i've suggested that you put them into this dish or you could use ancho chilies for this as well so don't if you think this looks like a great dish and you can't find the pasilla chilis then don't get frustrated and we're going to let those toast in the oil for a couple of minutes they'll become very aromatic you'll smell them when they're ready and this is going to give us the moment to make our puree out of this of course the fire roasted tomatoes would be my choice for this rather than just the regular canned diced tomatoes because they'll have a slightly smoky flavor it's richer it's more complex and so i tend to rely on those a lot let's look over here at these pasilla chili's now i'm getting a really beautiful toasted chili aroma going gorgeous and i will say that they are about ready so now is the moment to put in this tomato puree and we'll put in at the same time the second can of the fire roasted tomatoes and i am putting them in i didn't drain either one of these guys at all stir that as it sort of heats up now we're looking for a really juicy mixture here because this is going to be the the mixture that we simmer the pasta in so we're going to add to it some chicken broth we're gonna let this come to a simmer while while we chop some cilantro here so i've got i've got some beautiful fresh cilantro and i need about a half a cup or so of the chopped and i'm going to chop it like i always do with the stems all together just bunching it up and then working crosswise like this making a very thin slice and then we'll just add that too i think this will give us about a half a cup a lot of people like to make this dish with epesote so if you live near a mexican grocery store that carries episote you won't usually find it in the average grocery store but if you live near one you might want to put it in here at this point not did don't usually chop the leaves of the epazote just put them in whole so we've got our cilantro in there and then we we need to taste this now because we want to have a very nicely seasoned base to simmer the the fideos in okay so let me i'm gonna guess here that this is gonna take about a teaspoon of salt um because we haven't we don't have anything in here with salt so let's just start with that and see what that gives us now now if that was a soup it would be just right but i need to put just a little bit more of it in there and let's take a look at these videos nice so they're evenly toasted now you can see how beautiful those guys are we've got our sauce now seasoned and ready to um to take these fidels in so we will just slide them in and nestle them down they have to be completely covered with the the sauce and after about i'm say about three or four minutes they will soften enough that you can break these little coils apart [Music] okay this is what the fidel circle should look like of course i've got mushrooms in here so it's a little different than the absolutely classic version of this dish but i am going to put the cream in there now i a little bit more than a half a cup is what you're going to need here i put half of it into the mix and just kind of let that mix in beautifully of course it starts looking really luscious when you have that cream in there and this would be either mexican crema or creme fraiche or you could use some heavy cream but it won't be drizzle drizzleable on the top so you would want to add it all in at once now we're ready to do all the toppings on it so i'm going to turn the the temperature off here this took us a right at about eight minutes total from the time i put the the fideos in there about four minutes for them to start to soften up and then break apart and then about four minutes more but you're going to just have to stand there and test it because your videos may be a little bit different a little thicker a little thinner than the ones that i have here so i'm going to take a portion of the fideos this stuff makes a great main course and then you might want to put some chorizo sausage on top of it or i actually like to serve it with a piece of grilled fish too i mean there's lots of different options with this but let's just say you were going to do it more like a pasta course as a as a first or second course in a meal then i have the the um goat cheese that i'm gonna put on here well let's first drizzle it with a little bit of cream so i have more of this crema left it's a little too thick for me to use as a as a drizzle so i'm just going to stir just a tiny bit of water into it to soften it up if you had sour cream that you wanted to drizzle on top you can't really put it into the pasta dish because it will curdle in the pasta dish but maybe you want to if you've got the creme fraiche you're working with you could do that just soften it up so that you can drizzle a little bit more of it on the top now some people in the in the classic version will put avocado on it and that would certainly be welcome on this one if you want to do that what i'm going to put on is goat cheese crumbles here because i love that with the mushrooms the sprinkling of the goat cheese and then for me i absolutely love putting a whole handful of cilantro leaves over the top just scatter them on like that and then though i didn't call for it in this recipe if you have some of the mexican grating cheese it would always be welcome on here something like the cotija and in my whole foods market near my house they have started carrying this already grated stuff it actually tastes more like parmesan than it does real cotija and there you have it my version of fideo secos it will satisfy a crowd i tell you this is one of my favorite things and in central mexico where fidel secos is a very popular dish all you have to do is mention those words and people's mouths start watering and they'll go oh that creamy pasta maybe they say they say chorizo maybe they say avocado but it's always that creamy tomatoey pasta with cheese and i think we all love that don't we so i encourage you to make this it's a very easy recipe to do and you can serve a crowd with it enjoy your time in the kitchen and enjoy fidel saeco

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 40,364

Rating: 4.9482937 out of 5

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Id: uD8loWf7ew8

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021