Guacho de Mariscos
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I first came across guacho (pronounced, WAH-cho) at the fish market in Panama City, where there is a restaurant on a sort of mezzanine sitting above the vendors. Guacho is a rice porridge, almost like a risotto, but made from regular, extra-long grain white rice. The rice is soaked in water for a couple of hours before being simmered in a seafood stock for a few hours, until the grains give up almost all their starch, and expand by about three times. The base flavors come from a sofrito, and the porridge is studded with bite-sized pieces of seafood, mostly shellfish. Guacho is a classic Panamanian dish, usually cooked for holidays (especially lent) and other festive occasions, but some families will chow down on this during once-a-week get togethers. This is a dish from the coastal regions of Panama, where fishermen’s families could stretch a little of bit of their catch into a meal for a large extended family. There are only a few recipes available online, so I took what little information there was, and grafted it to a base of asopao de mariscos recipes I was able to find. Asopao is a rice-based seafood soup found mostly in the Latin Caribbean, and is something I was somewhat familiar with from growing up in NYC. The key here is slowly simmering the rice in the seafood-flavor liquid to coax the starches out of the rice and marry all the flavors. The seafood itself is almost a garnish, put in at the end for just enough time for it to cook through. This is a meal in and of itself, and the only additions I recommend are fresh lime juice and some hot sauce.
