For the past week, I’ve been a woman on a mission.
A cooking mission, to be more exact.
A cooking mission to make excellent Arroz con Pollo to be as exact as possible.
Arroz con Pollo (or Chicken with Rice/Rice with Chicken) does not seem like it would be a hard recipe to master. You cook some chicken. You cook some rice. You throw in some spices. Viola!
Or so I thought before my first attempt. I picked an easy One-Pot recipe, I used ingredients I had in my kitchen, I told myself it would turn out amazing.
Spoiler alert: it did not turn out amazing.
The rice was supposed to cook in the pot with the chicken, but it didn’t cook. It stayed crunchy FOREVER and then eventually some of it was mushy and some of it was crunchy and I was just annoyed by the whole endeavor. My roommate was nice enough to eat a bowl-full, but we both knew it wasn’t great.
And my cooking mission was born.
I was determined to make amazing Arroz con Pollo.
I picked a different recipe this time (thank you Pinterest and your seemingly never-ending supply of recipes), did some grocery shopping, and made a battle plan.
Cooking rice on the stove never seems to work out for me, so I wasn’t going to attempt it again. Instead I decided to make the rice in my rice cooker and add it in toward the end of cooking the chicken and veggies.
It was an ingenious plan, if I do say so myself (and I totally do).
Spoiler alert: it was not as ingenious as I thought.
My second Arroz con Pollo started out pretty well. I mixed spices with the chicken and fried it up in a bit of butter and garlic. Then I added in onion and red peppers as they seemed like good veggies for the dish. After that I added in diced tomatoes and mild green chilis (I’m a wimp when it comes to spices) and it really seemed to bring it all together.
It smelled amazing. It looked pretty great. I was very impressed with myself.
And then came the time to add in rice. And this is where things took a turn.
Because I factored in that the rice was already cooked so didn’t need to go in with the chicken right away. But I forgot to factor in the amount of liquid that would no longer be necessary with pre-cooked rice.
Once the chicken and veggies were cooked up the recipe required that chicken broth be added in to help make a sauce. It also was necessary to cook the rice. Which should have occured to me, but didn’t until it was too late.
I’m sure you can all guess what happened next. I added in the broth, I let everything simmer for about 15 minutes, then I added in the cooked rice. And since the rice was already cooked and didn’t need extra liquid to help it along, two fun things happened: first, the cooked rice became mushy, and second, it didn’t absorb enough fluid so I ended up with soup.
Chicken and rice and soup.
I added in cheese to help solidify things, and simmered for a few more minutes to evaporate some of the liquid, so it wasn’t quite as soupy as it could have been. But it still wasn’t right.
It tasted good. I ate two bowls of it.
But it wasn’t right.
It wasn’t amazing.
The rice was still wrong.
And it can’t be great Arroz con Pollo if the rice is wrong.
SO …
I am a woman still on a mission.
*If you have a great recipe for Arroz con Pollo I could try, please post in the comments!*
