Brodetto all'Anconetana

“Brodetto” is one of the typical recipes of a sea area, that varies from region to region (“brodetto alla vastese”, “caciucco alla livornese”, ecc.)

Ingredients you will need for 6 people

1500 g different fish varieties (ask the fishmonger’s a mix of fish for brodetto);
500 g tomatoes;
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion
Garlic;
½ glass of water;
½ glass of white wine vinegar;
Parsley;
Salt and pepper.

How to prepare it
Put few cloves of onion roughly chopped in a bowl or better in a large non-stick pan. Add a mix of few cloves of garlic and some sprigs of parsley roughly chopped too. Add a rockfish and some tomatoes formerly chopped to small pieces. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. When the rockfish is cooked, put it through a sieve. Then put it again in the pan with the other fish, following this order: first cuttlefish and squids, then the other varieties according to their cooking time. Bring to the boil, sprinkle with vinegar and go on cooking it for 20 minutes. When the “soup” is dense, serve it on a slice of crusty bread, according to the old tradition. Anyway, if you want you can use brodetto as a sauce for your pasta. In this case, you should cook a brodetto less dense and you shouldn’t add vinegar.
As Numana is located between Ancona and Recanati, we propose the Recanati version of brodetto too. Main steps are the same. The relevant difference is you don’t have to use tomatoes but saffron. You don’t have to sprinkle with vinegar and you have to flour fish before to put it in the pan. As a result, you obtain a denser “soup” than the Ancona one, with a particular bronze colour. Such a way to prepare brodetto is typical of all the Marche coast.