Arroz con Pollo Sinaloense

This is from Sinaloa. The northwest, the Pacific coast, the long flat agricultural state that grows most of the tomatoes Mexico eats and most of the shrimp it sends abroad. Arroz con pollo exists across Latin America, and every country claims their version, but the sinaloense one is built on three things the state has in abundance: chicken, tomato, and rice. The achiote ties it to the older Yucatecan trade routes that carried the seed paste across Mexico long before there were borders.

The technique is simple in description and unforgiving in execution. You sear the chicken in lard. You toast the rinsed rice in the rendered fat until it smells like popcorn. You pour in a blended puree of tomato, onion, garlic, and achiote and let it darken in the pan. Then hot broth, the chicken nested back on top, a tight lid, twenty minutes of nothing. If you stir the rice while it cooks, you have ruined it. If you skip the toasting, the grain falls apart. If you use boneless chicken breast, you get something a Sinaloa cook would not put on her family's table.

My mother was from Jalisco, not Sinaloa, but she cooked this dish on Sundays when there were too many of us to feed and not enough hours to cook anything elaborate. Her notebook has it written under the title 'arroz amarillo con pollo,' with a note in the margin: 'manteca, no aceite.' Lard, not oil. She underlined it twice. I have eaten this dish in homes from Culiacan to Mazatlan to Los Mochis and she had it right. Cada estado, su propia cocina, but some principles travel.