Besides the Obvious

I’m a big fan of cooking and trying new recipes when traveling, and then preparing, recreating them at home. Besides that, I’m even bigger fan of soups, that are based on beans, lentils or like in case of this recipe, chickpeas. This chickpea soup is one of those. Since I’m living in Barcelona, I already tried and tasted many amazing Catalan dishes, as well as while traveling around Spain, many mouthwatering Spanish recipes, many great Andalusian dishes. 😋 But somehow, till this moment I have never met this Potaje. Funny enough, as I love all the ingredients, so simply it could not be bad, and the fact that this is a soup, and it’s made with cod… 😋 From locals I know that the most common is to find it on menu del día, and rarely a la carte. I have never tried it in restaurants, neither tasted elsewhere, so without knowing how it should taste exactly it’s an even better experiment. 😁

There are different versions of this recipe, with or without cod / spinach, adding boiled eggs or not, and whatever vegetable you find at home, could be considered. We chose a basic recipe, and it’s honestly very easy to make it! The only thing is that it requires at least 1,5 hour preparation and you shouldn’t forget to put the chickpeas into water with at least 4 hours before, but the best is to leave for overnight under water.

So this is how it started, we put the garbanzos (chickpeas) into a big bowl and covered with water. So actually it stayed there almost 18 hours.

The next day I boiled 1,5 liters of water with two cubes of pescado (fish) broth. Of course you can prepare the broth freshly from scratch at home, but then you won’t be ready that quick with this dish. I used the one available at Mercadona, from Knorr.

Then added the chopped carrots to the water and let it boil together for a while, until you are done with the rest.

For the rest you will need a big pan, add extra virgin olive oil and heat it. Once the oil reaches the right temperature you should add the chopped leek, the onions and the garlic and you can fry them till the onion pieces are becoming transparent.

After you can add the chopped bell paprika to it and the washed dried cod pieces.

You should fry them together for 5 minutes, and then you can add the washed spinach leaves too and fry it for 5 more minutes together. As well as this is the moment to add salt, black pepper, garlic powder and red paprika, based on your taste.

In the meantime you can add the chickpeas to the broth and boil it together for 5 minutes.

Once the vegetable – cod mix is ready, you can add it to the broth, and then it’s recommended to cook it together for 60-90 minutes. This part is the worst, especially if you are hungry, the smell, the look, you just can’t wait to eat it. But it’s true, the longer you cook it, the better it will be, actually for me the leftovers had the best taste that I ate the next day after reheating the soup. 😋

Ingredients

• 250g chickpeas, washed, picked over and soaked for 4 hours or overnight in water
• 3-4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 medium onion, chopped
• 1 leek, chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 red fresh bell paprika
• 150-200g dried cod
• 2-3 carrots
• ¼ cup dry white wine (optional)
• 1,5 liter fish broth
• Salt, garlic, red paprika, black pepper to taste
• 500g spinach, stemmed, washed thoroughly in 2 changes of water

Have you heard about this soup? Have you ever tried it? Do you know any different version of this recipe? Please share with us in the comment section. Thank you! 🙏

For more recipes check our Culinary Journey section.

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