Soups Perote #VPeats

Recently, I saw an opportunity to enter a food challenge and I am so glad to be part of it. In celebration of Villa Plus’ new “Local Food” guides that have been rolled out for each destination, they are asking bloggers to recreate a dish from one of the regions. There are 5 regions (Menorca, Kefalonia, Costa Blanca, Fuertaventura, Costa Del Sol) and with 2 bloggers to each region. I was chosen to cook a Costa Del Sol dish.

To be honest, I have never been to Costa Del Sol nor tried their local cuisine. So I did some quick research and did a very quick dish which is the soups perote. I chose this dish as this is my first time cooking such a dish and therefore I liked the fact that it uses minimal ingredients which are easy to get hold of. I was also intrigued that it uses old bread. So if you happen to have any old bread, you might want to try this out instead of baking bread pudding.

I had followed the recipe on Visit Costa Del Sol Soups Perote. This is a typical dish of the town of Alora in the Guadalhorce valley region. Every October, the village celebrates the Soups Perote Day.

All the ingredients used in this dish were bought from supermarket. This soups perote comes in at £1.20 per person and they can be easily found in any supermarkets.

I decided to bake my own bread instead of buying it from the supermarket. I had previously written a bread recipe, please click here to see the method. You require strong white bread, yeast, warm water, salt and sugar. This is what I had baked two days ago and left it on the side.

To cook soups perote, you need:

• three ripe tomatoes
• an onion
• a pepper
• a clove of garlic
• hierbabuena (mint will do)
• saffron
• ground black pepper,
• olive oil
• salt

Method:

1. Cook the onions together with the tomatoes, the pepper, the garlic and the saffron.
2. In a separate pan, boil 1 litre of water with a little salt, then add the mixture and simmer for a while.
3. Place slices of bread (which should be several days old) in a casserole to cover the bottom, pressing down if necessary to fit. Lay a few sprigs of mint over the bread.
   
4. When the broth is made, pour over the bread so that it is completely soaked. This soup is best served piping hot.

It was that simple to cook and now this is another method to using stale bread! I am not a big fan of stale bread but this is useful when you have plenty of bread to use! This soup is also great for vegetarian.

My husband is not a big fan of bread in soup as he doesn’t like the bread becoming soggy. On the other hand, I enjoyed eating the soggy bread.

Disclosure: I have been compensated to buy the ingredients for this challenge, however, all thoughts and opinions remain our own.