MARKETS : El Camaguey: Westside Tapas Supplier

El Camaguey Market; 10925 W. Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 839-4037. Monday-Saturday 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

For many years El Camaguey Market has been strictly a Cuban carniceria, a little bit of Havana on a sleepy stretch of Venice Boulevard. It still sells handmade cigars from a humidor near the cash register. Nearby are a cluster of Cuban restaurants, including the 30-year-old El Rincon Criollo and the famous Versailles, reminders that El Camaguey is smack in the middle of a long-established Cuban enclave in West Los Angeles.

Recently, however, these Cuban restaurants have been joined by a couple of Argentine places and a Brazilian deli, and El Camaguey has expanded its display of “I love Cuba” bumper stickers to include stickers for Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina and Chile. Like any good business, this little market has kept pace with the needs of its changing clientele, and these days its shelves are bulging with intriguing merchandise from South and Central America.

The store has always been a good source for Spanish tapas supplies, as Cuban cooking calls for many Spanish ingredients. The ones here include several varieties of chorizo and jamon serrano, a dry-cured ham similar to Italian prosciutto. You can also find all the basics for Brazilian cooking, a new section of Central American bakery goods across the aisle from the Cuban breads, and also Guatemalan and Salvadoran specialties.

Meat here can be cut to order in the butcher shop, but I’m sorry to say I can’t recommend the tired-looking fresh fish. The produce section is quite basic, and it includes a huge display of plantains divided into green, medium ripe and very ripe. In season, the store carries a specialty fruit or two, though nothing as exotic as some of the larger stores downtown.

But if you live on the Westside and are looking for basic Spanish, South and Central American ingredients, El Camaguey is a good place to stop.

SHOPPING LIST: TAPAS INGREDIENTS

Note that these ingredients are not limited to tapas but are basic to all kinds of dishes.

Tasajo: a dense, deep red, dry-cured beef imported from Brazil that often appears in Brazil’s national dish, feijoada completa-- a rich stew of black beans and many kinds of meat and sausages. Cubans also use tasajo in cooking and serve it in a saute of onions, garlic and tomatoes known as a sofrito. (“Try it at Versailles,” the manager told me.) It comes to the tapas bar cut into cubes, impaled with wood picks.

Chorizo cantimpalo: A dry-cured Spanish-style sausage like a long thin salami seasoned with garlic and paprika. It may be eaten cold but is also often used as seasoning in rice, egg and potato dishes.

Spanish chorizo: The Spanish make many regional chorizos but this all-purpose link sausage is semi-cured, giving its flavor more intensity than other fresh chorizos. It’s especially wonderful along with smoked ham hock in a pot of black beans or in paella. Chorizo also comes packed in lard, which cooks use for frying sofrito and seasoning dishes, particularly those containing beans.

Jamon serrano: Known as “Spanish ham,” this silky, fully cured ham resembles Italian prosciutto, but the flavor is slightly different. It’s sold here sliced in 4-ounce packages.

Morcilla: Every Latin country has its own blood sausage. At El Camaguey, Argentine, Mexican and Spanish styles are sold. The Argentine variety, deep maroon with a soft blood pudding texture, is used in the Argentine mixed grill platter parilladas, while the Mexican style has more meat and onions in it and is more easily cut into chunks for tapas.

Manchego cheese: A sheep’s milk cheese resembling fresh Parmesan cheese: smooth, dense and rather sharp tasting. Soft enough to munch and dry enough to grate, it’s a good all-purpose Spanish cheese that melts beautifully and evenly.

Pimientos horneados: These delicious roasted sweet peppers are smaller, sweeter and thicker-fleshed than bell peppers. Often they’re used in cooked dishes and to decorate food, but for tapas, simply slice them into long strips, sprinkle with a little extra-virgin olive oil and serve with good bread and salty items such as sardines and olives. Pimientos also come unroasted.

Marinated seafood items: El Camaguey has nearly a whole gondola filled with a stupendous collection of fish and seafood items imported from Spain. These include marinated tuna, tuna in tomato sauce and calamares en su tinto (tiny squids in their own ink--a big seller). You’ll also find baby stuffed squids, octopus in garlic and olive oil, cockles in brine and bacalao (salt cod) in tomato sauce.

Spanish sardines: Sardines are given all of the above treatments and more such as tomato sauce, pickling sauce and garlic olive oil.

Papas criollas (de Colombia): Look for these tiny, jaw-breaker-sized potatoes in the upright freezer section. In South America they are deep-fried and served with meat or simmered in stews. As tapas, deep fry or boil them and serve with a garlicky mayonnaise sprinkled with chives or parsley.

Bacalao: Salt cod is used in hundreds of delicious ways: blanketed with sauces or simmered in stews and, of course, for tapas. The recipe included is from Brazil, where it is called bacalhau in Portuguese . El Camaguey sells bacalao as whole dried codfish or the center-cut meaty skinless fillets.

Boiled octopus: Usually used in salads or simply marinated in a vinaigrette. The day I visited El Camaguey the octopus was looking reasonably good, but inspect it closely; some of the fish here is not in its prime.

BAHIAN INGREDIENTS

These are the relatively hard-to-find Afro-Brazilian ingredients used in the cooking of Bahia in northern Brazil.

Dende oil: Also known as red palm oil and indispensable in Bahian cooking. It is a rich saturated oil extracted from palm nuts and gives foods a meaty flavor as well as tinting them slightly orange. A little goes a long way, but there’s no Bahian flavor without it. Try this sauce with fish: Blend 1/4 cup dende oil, 1/2 cup vinegar and 1 thinly sliced onion mashed together with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 3 very hot red peppers or a little red habanero pepper sauce.

Dry shrimp: Look on the spice rack at the end of the meat counter for dried shrimp. These have a flavor of their own, not quite the same as the Chinese variety which are often called for in Brazilian recipes on the assumption that South American dried shrimp are unavailable.

Gandules: Also called pigeon peas, they are popular with rice and sofrito . And no Brazilian festival would be complete without acaraje, a fritter made from dried shrimp and skinned gandules ground to meal, mixed with onion and fried in dende oil. In Bahia, a flat, rough-surfaced rectangular stone and a rolling pin make short work of peeling the dried beans, but they may also be peeled by blanching for five minutes and rubbing in a towel. El Camaguey carries gandules frozen, canned and dried.

Dried beef: See tasajo under tapas ingredients.

Farinha de mandioca: Made from ground cassava and often called cassava meal in English. Brazilians toast it to make farofa, which is sprinkled over meats, beans and so many other dishes that it appears on every Brazilian table in shakers. It also thickens stews and sauces and makes a number of porridgy dishes.

Coconut milk: Unfortunately El Camaguey has only canned coconut milk, not the frozen coconut milk found in Thai and Filipino markets.

TROPICAL ROOT VEGETABLES

There are four similar-looking root vegetables with scaly, hairy, brown exteriors. Sorting them out can be as confusing as remembering the difference between butternut and banana squash or between sweet potatoes and yams. To muddle things further, some countries give different names to the same root. The store manager will tell your yuca from your name.

Fortunately, all are cooked and eaten similarly. All of these root vegetables come fresh, and you’ll also find a freezer full of them cut, peeled and ready to use.

Yuca : Also called cassava, this is the plant from which tapioca is made. It’s also ground into Jamaican cassava pudding--a rather chewy concoction--and is skinned and boiled and eaten with sauced dishes or deep fried and served with deep-fried pork as yuca con chicharron in Central American restaurants.

Yautia : The Puerto Rican name for the root called malanga in Cuba. It has a mustier, earthier flavor than the other roots discussed here.

Dasheen : This is the same as the Polynesian taro. It is best boiled then deep fried or pan fried, and it should be eaten very hot or it will be gluey. It goes best with sausages, dried meat and spicy fish dishes with plenty of sauce. In Belize, where it’s called coco, it is one of the main ingredients in the traditional Saturday dish of fish “boil-up,” a stew made with salty pork, fish and a sofrito.

Name or yam is not related to the orange sweet potato served at Thanksgiving time. This white- or ivory-fleshed tuber is fried as chips or boiled and served as a foil for soups and sauced foods.

GENERAL INGREDIENTS

Habanero peppers: Look for these in the upright freezer in plastic bags. Habaneros , also called Scotch Bonnets, belong to a different species from all the other chiles we use and are reputedly among the hottest peppers on Earth. Jamaican, Belizean and Yucatecan cooks love them. And because they now come bottled as a fragrant but incendiary sauce, they are catching on here--according to one hot pepper expert--”like wildfire.” Look for bottled habanero sauce by the Brazilian dende oil. It comes in brilliant green and red varieties.

Calabaza: Huge slices of these large bright orange squashes are always displayed, for some reason, on top of the butcher’s case. Calabaza is sold sliced everywhere in Central and South America because the whole vegetable is too large for one shopper to carry off. The squashes have a meatier, less watery texture than pumpkin. In Cuba, in addition to being used in soups and stews, they are mashed with butter, cinnamon and a little flour and made into fritters.

Ullucos: These potato-like roots from Colombia look like a purple version of fresh turmeric root (skinnier than fresh ginger). Cook them with onion, tomato sauce, peas, potatoes, cut corn and beef or pork, according to the recipe on the label.

Annatto paste: Used constantly in Latin America for its subtle flavor and color, the russet seed pulp from the annatto tree comes whole and must be crushed or steeped in oil before adding it to foods. This handy paste eliminates all that fuss. Look for it on the shelves beneath the canned pimientos.

Achiote paste: Sold in blocks. This is basically the same as annatto paste, but seasoned with oregano and other spices, so it is not always substitutable for annatto paste.

Pico de gallo seasoning: Also located on the shelf under the roasted pimientos is a seasoning blend of mixed hot peppers and salt to sprinkle over papaya, melon, cucumber or corn.

Banana leaves: On weekends you’ll find stacks of the leaves near the butcher counter; they’re also sold frozen in neat, pre-cut oblongs, ready for wrapping pollo en pibil (pit-cooked or steamed seasoned chicken wrapped in banana leaves), or Southern Mexican, Central or South American-style tamales.

Spanish olive oils: Stylish bottles lined up smartly show off the varied hues of imported Spanish olive oil that El Camaguey carries, from the lightest extra virgin (wonderful for salads) to the regular variety used for cooking.

Black and red beans: As you might expect from a Cuban market, El Camaguey has bags of beans and rice stacked to the ceiling. But you can also buy black and red beans canned, either cooked in seasonings or simply boiled.

Tuna: These crisp cactus fruits known as prickly pear aren’t prickly when you buy them, because all the spines have been removed. To eat these crunchy, semi-sweet fruits you cut them in half lengthwise and scoop out the flesh with a spoon. Their availability is seasonal.

RECIPES

Here’s a Colombian stew using the various root vegetables and plantains discussed above.

SANCOCHO

2 pounds beef chuck, cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes

12 ounces dried beef (tasajo) cut into 1/2-inch cubes

2 large onions, sliced

4 cloves garlic, minced

3 medium tomatoes, seeds squeezed out and chopped

1 bay leaf

1 pound yuca or cassava root, peeled and thickly sliced

1 pound taro (dasheen), peeled and thickly sliced

1 pound malanga (yautia), peeled and thickly sliced

6 cups chicken broth

1 (3 1/2-pound) chicken, cut into serving pieces

1 pound name, peeled and sliced

1 pound calabaza, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes

2 green plantains, peeled and thickly sliced

2 ripe plantains, peeled and thickly sliced

3 ears fresh corn, cut into 3 slices

Salt, pepper

4 limes, cut into wedges

Hot pepper sauce or aji mirasol pepper paste

Combine beef, dried beef, onions, garlic, tomatoes, bay leaf, yuca, taro, malanga and broth in large pot over high heat. Bring to boil then reduce heat, skim off any froth and simmer 1 hour 15 minutes.

Add chicken pieces, name, calabaza and green and ripe plantains. Turn heat up and when stew is simmering, reduce heat to low and cook until chicken and vegetables are tender, about 45 minutes.

Add corn and season to taste with salt and pepper. Continue cooking about 5 minutes longer.

Remove meats to serving platter with slotted spoon. Remove vegetables to another platter. Serve broth in tureen and offer wide soup plates for service so that diners can help themselves to meat, vegetables and broth. Serve with quartered limes and hot pepper sauce or paste. Makes about 8 servings.

A Brazilian recipe from the region of Minas Gerais.

BACALHAU A MINEIRA

1 pound boneless salt cod, cut into 3x1-inch strips

2 tablespoons olive oil or butter

1 clove garlic, minced

1 large onion, minced

1/4 cup chopped parsley

1 tomato, seeds squeezed out and diced

2 cups finely shredded green cabbage

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

Hot cooked rice

Up to 4 days ahead of serving time, place salt cod in dish and add water to cover. Place in refrigerator and let soak, changing water 3 or 4 times per day. Rinse cod strips well and pat dry in paper towels.

Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat. Add fish, garlic, onion and parsley. Cook and stir until onion begins to become translucent. Add tomato and cook about 1 minute longer. Add cabbage and mix well. Cover and cook over low heat until cabbage is tender. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with rice. Makes 4 to 6 servings.