Vegan lentil picadillo is filling, flavorful
Traditionally made with ground or finely chopped meat, picadillo is a tomatobased stew popular in countries that were colonized by the Spanish. Picadillo comes from the Spanish verb picar, which means to mince or chop.
It’s used in dozens and dozens of other dishes, including baked pastries, stuffed fritters, roasted main courses, pastas and soups. You can serve it in a tortilla or between two buns, with potatoes or over greens, in a layered casserole, or stuffed into squash, peppers or tomatoes.
The way I like it best, though, is over rice, and these days I’m more likely to make this vegan version, using a can of lentils instead of a pound of ground beef. Both my beef and lentil versions start with a flavorful base of onions and garlic, get a boost from a blend of spices and are finished with a few pimentostuffed Manzanilla olives and raisins.
“Raisins are divisive,” said Jessica van Dop DeJesus, of the Dining Traveler. “I always start with a sofrito, and add extra onion because I liked the texture of the chopped onion. And I’m team olive.”
“I like a sweet version, with fresh and dried fruit for stuffing chiles en nogada,” my friend Adriana Velez texted when I asked how she made her picadillo. “For other dishes, I like it more savory, with olives, adobo, sazon [Latin seasoning blend], cumin seeds and coriander.”
Blogger A d r i a n n a picadillo.
Adarme of A Cozy Kitchen, My vegan version eschews who is Peruvian- Colombian, the meat for lentils, features fried potatoes, which provide texture and bay leaves and hardboiled protein, and absorb the flavors eggs, in addition to from the sofrito or recaito, olives and raisins, in her the finely minced hearty Cuban-style recipe. base of onions, garlic, mild Recipe de veloper Rick peppers, aji dulce, cilantro, Martinez adds a chopped and its perkier sister, culantro. poblano chili to his Mexicanpicadillo. The picadillo starts with
There’s no wrong way to a sofrito — a flavor base of
onions, garlic and other aromatics — which is fortified with carrots and mushrooms. Aji dulce and culantro can be hard to find but are traditional in Puerto Rican- style sofrito, the kind I grew up with. If you don’t have them, don’t worry. This recipe will work without them, too.
The sofrito is really the only finicky part of this recipe because it’s just much easier and faster if you use your food processor or a blender to make it. (I have never made sofrito by finely chopping all of the ingredients by hand, but that’s an option, albeit a more tedious one.) If you already have homemade sofrito in your fridge or freezer, feel free to use it instead.
After you saute the sofrito for a few minutes, add soy sauce, tomato paste, brown sugar and spices. This elevates and evens out the flavor of a can of lentils, which go in next with their liquid, followed by a can of diced or crushed tomatoes. Bring it to a simmer, add olives and raisins if you’d like, taste it for seasoning and, a few minutes later, it’s done.