Receta: Mi guiso de Hallacas || Recipe: My Hallacas Stew ♥

Hallacas are a fundamental element of the Venezuelan Christmas dish and today I want to show you how I prepared the stew for the hallacas we made at home.

There are many ways to make it, everyone adds their own personal seasoning. I like to follow the tradition of my mother's family, as my grandfather made a stew that was the best in the world.

The three times I have made hallacas I have tried to replicate that flavour, although I still feel that it lacks that special touch that he gave it, it is very similar and its flavour is spectacular.

I won't talk much about quantities because I don't really remember much, but I do remember the ingredients I used to achieve the result. I hope you like it and serve as a reference for when you prepare your hallacas. ♥

This is a job that takes a lot of time and patience, so I recommend you to be in a comfortable place with some music, as I did.

I started by chopping all the vegetables into small squares. I used red pepper, green pepper, spring onion, leek, sweet pepper and onion.

It took me two and a half hours to chop everything, as I wanted it to be very small and I'm not an expert in the matter, so it took me longer.

The last thing I chopped was the onion, for obvious reasons. My eyes burned a bit while I was doing it, but it was tolerable. Almost at the end my husband said to me: "Look at Osiris, his eyes are burning" and when I turned to look at him I found this super funny scene. It made me very sad and laugh to see him like that, but nobody sends him as a tattletale hahaha.

Then I chopped the beef and pork. For beef I bought the tenderloin and for pork I bought the pork chop. I removed the fat from both meats and cooked them separately to extract the oil. With this oil I would cook part of the stew, but first I would mix it with onoto.

A fundamental part of the stew are the capers, olives and raisins. For this I asked my son to chop them into small pieces, as I am not a fan of finding these ingredients whole in the hallaca and to avoid having to take them out I prefer to do it this way.

I mixed the oil obtained from the pork fat with vegetable oil and cooked it with the onoto or achiote until it turned a deep red colour.

I cooked several cloves of garlic in the oil, then added the vegetables and when they crystallised I removed them from the pan.

In the pot I put the pork and the meat and when they were cooked I added the vegetables again. Then the raisins, olives and capers.

I also seasoned with salt, oregano, garlic powder, onoto and pepper.

I added a little bit of panela to the preparation to give it a sweet touch. A little more oil with onoto and finally a beer.

I let it cook for about 1 hour for all the flavours to integrate well and after that it was ready to use. ♥

I hope you liked my recipe and I'll see you in the next one for the assembly of the hallacas.