Catalan soup (escudella i carn d'olla)

I learned this recipe from my mother. Escudella i carn d’olla is one of the typical Christmas dish in Catalunya. I enjoy preparing this meal since it’s a “slow” recipe (it can take around 2 or 3 hours to prepare) and I feel like a wizard mixing magic ingredients in my cauldron. I also like that none of the ingredients in the recipe are wasted.

Material

• A 9 liter pot.

Ingredients (4 pax)

• Vegetables
  • 2 carrots.
  • 2 sticks of celery.
  • 1 turnip.
  • 1 parsnip.
  • 1 leek.
• Meat
  • 2 white sausage
  • 2 blood sausage
  • 500g minced pork
  • 2 pig’s foot
  • 250g beef bones
  • 1 ham bone
  • 1 pork backbone
  • 1 drumstick chicken
• 2 eggs.
• Breadcrumb (size of a muffin).
• Milk.
• 500g of galets. Galets are a snail-shaped pasta used for soups in Catalunya. You can use any other soup pasta you want.
• Salt
• Pepper

Directions

Carn d’olla and pilotes

I don’t know even know how to translate these expressions from Catalan to Spanish, so I’ve no idea which would be the equivalent in English. It could be more or less translated to meatball, but it’s not exactly the same. I think it’s better if you google them.

1. Mix the minced pork, the eggs, the bread and the milk. Add also salt and pepper. Drain the excess of milk.
2. The resulting mix should have a compact structure, if it’s too soft you can add more breadcrumb.
3. Make balls of the size of half a fist.

Broth

1. Fill the pot up to 3/4 of its capacity and bring the water to a boil.
2. Add the vegetables cut into small pieces, but not tiny. Add also the bones and the pig’s foot. Boil it for 40 minutes.
3. Add the chicken drumstick and the beef meat. Boil for 20 minutes.
4. Add the “pilota” and the white sausage. Boil for 10 minutes.
5. Finally add the blood sausage and boil only for 3 minutes more.
6. Filter the broth to use it for the soup. You can throw the bones. Reserve the vegetables to prepare “trinxat”.
7. The pig’s foot need some more boiling. Boil them with a stock cube for 30 minutes more.

Trinxat

1. Drain as much as possible the excess of water from the vegetables.
2. Put some oil and chopped garlic in a pan.
3. Add the vegetables, and with a wooden spatula chop the vegetables little by little.
4. You can add some blood sausage (remove the skin before adding it).

Soup

1. Put 1 liter of broth for each 100 grams of pasta to boil.
2. Add the soup pasta in to the boiling broth.
3. Boil the soup pasta as long as the package indicates. If you’re using galets I recommend you to boil them longer than the specified.

Serve the soup in a bowl. You can include the pilota on the same bowl with the soup, or eat them later. You can also fill the galets with the pilota mixture and the boil everything together.

Pig’s foot

Once you have the pig’s foot boiled you can use them in a lot of recipes. Personally, I don’t mind eating them boiled and with a little oil and salt, but this is up to you.