Bacalao a la Riojana

Bacalao a la Riojana belongs to La Rioja, the vineyard country along the upper Ebro: salt cod laid over potatoes and held in a red sauce of slow onion, tomato, choricero flesh, and roasted piquillo peppers. Tomato and sweet preserved pepper mark the Riojan pot. This isn't bacalao a la vizcaína, whose classical sauce rests chiefly on onion and choricero without tomato, and it isn't cod hidden under a hurried spoonful of tomato sauce.

The point that decides the dish is timing. I cook the sofrito, the slow onion base, and reduce the tomato until the sauce is dark, sweet, and already finished before the cod returns. Salt cod gives up its flavour quickly, but its thick white flakes tighten if you make them wait while watery tomato cooks down. Let the potatoes become nearly tender first, then give the loins only their last few minutes at the lowest simmer.

No hace falta haber pisado España. Jarred choricero pulp is the cleanest substitute for dried peppers and changes almost nothing. If piquillos are hard to find, use whole jarred roasted red peppers without vinegar, drain them well, and cut them wide. They'll be broader and a little sweeter in flavour, but they belong in the same household cupboard. Ready-desalted frozen bacalao is better here than fresh cod, which lacks the cured depth that seasons the whole casserole.

Desalt the fish in the refrigerator and taste a cooked trimming before it reaches the pot. Salt packets and loin thicknesses differ, so the clock gets you close and the taste tells the truth. In the Margin beside this dish I keep one sentence: the fish waits for the sauce, never the sauce for the fish. Follow that, and it comes out.