Ingredient: potato

Salmon Pudding

(don't worry, it's not a fish dessert)

This is a real Swedish classic. As in Britain, also in Sweden a “pudding” can be both a dessert and a savory dish (unlike in Britain it can also mean an attractive person). This is… kind of a gratin I guess? There’s another traditional thing in Sweden called Cabbage pudding (coming on the blog sometime in the future), which is completely different from Salmon pudding so the Swedish word for savory “pudding” doesn’t mean much more than “stuff put together in an oven shape”, at least not to my knowledge. As you never now how traditional something you perceive as traditional really is, I did some light googling to get a sense of the history and it does seem to have been around quite a while. It is mentioned in the early 19th century, thou I would guess the recipe has gone through some changes since then. Presumably lemon wasn’t something that people had in general. On the other hand, maybe Salmon pudding wasn’t something ordinary people had? The good news is that all you ordinary people can have it now!

As it turns out, it’s also perfectly adapted to modern society as it’s an ideal lunch box meal. Easy to divvy up in pieces, well suited to be reheated in a microwave and you know…. ridiculously good, which is a big plus in my book.

It’s also one of these dishes that almost makes itself. Yes, there’s a bit of light seasoning but for the most part, the flavors come from the ingredients themselves and there’s not many of those. The only real hassle is slicing the potatoes and the onion which is why you should really have a kitchen mandolin handy.

Let’s get to it!

Special Equipment

  • Kitchen mandolin
Created with Sketch. 2 hours Created with Sketch. 8

Ingredients

  • 1 kgpotatoes (low starch)
  • 500 gcold smoked salmon
  • 2 yellow onions
  • 1 pot of dill
  • 6 normal sized eggs
  • 3 dlmilk
  • 3 dlcream
  • 350 gbutter
  • Some salt and black pepper

Directions

  1. Put the oven on 225 C.
  2. Smear the bottom of an oven pan with butter (50 g). Thinly slice potatoes and onion (preferably with a mandolin) and spread across the bottom. Sprinkle the surface with salt and black pepper. It’s hard to give any exact measure regarding the salt. It depends on how salt the salmon is, but it shouldn’t be a lot.
  3. Add a layer of salmon, then another layer of potato, onion and dill. Another sprinkle of salt and pepper (for each layer of potato). Repeat until you’re out of stuff.

  4. Mix the eggs (6), the milk (3 dl) and the cream (3 dl) in a bowl. Add a teaspoon of salt and a couple of dashes of black pepper, then pour the mix over the layers of potato, onion and salmon.
  5. Finish by spreading the surface with flakes of butter (100 g), more dill, the juice from 1/2 a lemon and another light sprinkle of salt.
  6. Put the pan into the oven for about 40-45 minutes (225 C). When it’s done the potatoes should have some firmness left and the top of the pudding should be ever so slightly burnt.
  7. Serve with clarified butter (200 g), some fresh dill and a slice of lemon.


This is actually a sort of summer dish, probably because of the fresh dill, but don’t let that stop you!

Cod, potato, green peas and hollandaise

(cod wonder)

Sometimes… most of the time..? All the time?! No, probably most of the time, the simple stuff is the best. Cod, potatoes, butter sauce. That’s perfect, isn’t it? I think so. I’m going to complicate stuff a bit (duh) but the basis of this dish is really simple. A few ingredients and very straight forward flavors.

We eat a lot of fish in Sweden and cod is kind of the king of the fishes. Or something. I tried to find the translation for this specific part of the cod (the back fillet) but I… well I failed. Maybe the English-speaking world does not make the distinction?

In this recipe I’m cooking the fish with the sous vide technique but it’s brilliant pan fried as well. It’s just a little bit easier to get it just right when using sous vide. Btw, I use the ANOVA sous vide machine, which I can really recommend.

So what’s the deal with sous vide? Well, it’s pretty straight forward. Vacuum seal something in a plastic bag with some spices and/or butter or whatever you think might be good. Then put the bag(s) in a temperature controlled water bath at the exakt temperature you want your meat/fish/veggie/whatever to be cooked at, and leave it in there for a long time (as compared to the cooking time using more “traditional” techniques). I think it’s pretty rare to get well prepared fish at “not-high-end”- restaurants, and actually also at many higher end restaurants. Why? It’s almost always overcooked. Dry, overcooked fish is… I mean, it’s not horrible or gross or whatever but it’s just such a waste, right?  When it’s juuuust right, it’s almost falling apart, it’s cooked through but only just so and it’s brilliant. When you’ve had that perfect thing, the overcooked one is such a sad reminder of what could have been. With sous vide, it’s so easy to get it just as you want it and basically impossible to fail. So you should really try it.

Special Equipment

  • Sous vide machine
  • Vacuum sealer
Created with Sketch. 1 hour for the cooking. Simple preparations to be made a couple of hours before cooking starts. Created with Sketch. 6 portions

Ingredients

  • 900 gcod (back) fillet
  • 2000 gsmall (low starch) potatoes
  • 300 ggreen peas
  • 300 gbutter
  • 5 egg yolks
  • 1 lemons (possibly two if they're small)
  • Cayenne pepper
  • Quite some salt
  • Some white pepper

Directions

  1. Firstly, we’re gonna prepare the fish. Brining is something that you should do with almost anything fish, poultry or pork. It’s basically letting the meat soak in salt water for a time before cooking. It gives the meat extra moisture and a natural saltiness that is very nice. So: dissolve about 50-60 grams of salt in 300 grams of water in a pot. When dissolved, add 700 grams of ice-cold water to the solution and put in a bowl. Add the fish to the salt water and put in the fridge for a couple of hours (or what time you have)
  2. Fill up a pot with cold water, add the potatoes and A LOT of salt. About 100 g. Seriously. Put it on high heat under a lid. When it boils, turn the stove off and leave the potatoes (under lid) in the boiling warm water. This is a pretty good trick when making potatoes. They come out just right (but check after a while anyway, I wouldn’t want overcooked anything on my conscience after that rant in the intro).
  3. Turn the oven to max.
  4. Set the sous vide machine to 47 or 48 degrees C and 45 minutes.
  5. Take the fish out of the brine. Rinse off the salt water and dry the fillets with some kitchen paper.
  6. Vacuum seal the fillets. Add som spices to the vacuum bag if you want!
  7. Put the bags in the sous vide machine (when it’s at temperature of course).
  8. Now, let’s make hollandaise! Bring a pot of water to a simmer. When it’s simmering put the stove on the lowest heat setting.
  9. Cut the 250 grams of the butter into about 2 cm x 2 cm big cubes.
  10. Mix 30 ml (2 tablespoons) of lemon juice with the egg yolks in a bowl. Put the bowl over the simmering water and heat the mixture while whisking. Use a metal bowl or at least something that can transmit heat. If you use a thick ceramic bowl the yolk/lemon mixture is probably not gonna get hot enough.
  11. When the egg/lemon mixture starts thickening, drop in a butter cube while continuing to stir/ whisk (if the egg/lemon mix thickens very quickly or becomes very thick, take the bowl off the water bath). When the cube has dissolved, drop another one in. Continue until you run out of butter. I use this technique instead of melting the butter first and then pouring it in to the yoke, as I think it’s easier to avoid the sauce breaking doing it this way.
  12. Add cayenne pepper, white pepper and possibly lemon and salt, to you liking. Note that you can’t refrigerate butter sauces. The butter sets and can’t be reheated without breaking.
  13. Pour away the salt water from the potatoes and put them in the oven with som rapeseed oil for 10-15 minutes. Don’t rinse the potatoes. The salty water stuck to the skin will give it the perfect saltiness (i.e.: no need to add any salt when taking them out of the oven)
  14. Put the remaining butter (50 grams) in a pan. Heat the butter in the pan until it starts to brown.  Take the cod out of the vacuum bags and fry them for 10-15 seconds on each side. Be careful, the fillets can be very brittle.
  15. Boil the peas.
  16. Serve with fresh herbs, some fried kale, a squeeze of lemon or something… else?

A couple of notes.

If you use frozen fish (I did), be sure to thaw it gently. The meat easily becomes a bit thready and chewy if not treated carefully.

Why low starch potatoes? Well, low starch potatoes keep their shape better when cooked and therefore fits well for this recipe (I think).

Why all the salt? First of all: It’s not to make it taste very salty. It just gets…. tastier. A bit salty, yes, but not at all over the top (promise). I thiiiink it’s due to osmosis. The salty water is pulled in to the potato due to the higher ion-concentration in the water as compared to the water in the cells in the potato. The salt water adds moisture and saltiness to the potato, much like brining (it is basically brining).

So that’s what I think, but the internet gives… differing explanations. Some say it (the better taste) is due to the potatoes being cooked at a higher temperature (the salt raises the boiling point of the water), but this seems implausible to me as the temperature is very marginally higher. Some do say osmosis but that also doesn’t seem quite open and shut.

I have been planning on writing something about potatoes on the blog, primarily about this. Let’s hope I get to it soon. Oh, and I you know something about this potato stuff, do get in touch.

In the meantime? Get good at making cod and hollandaise. You’re in for a lifetime of tasty joy!

Greek style Chicken with Potato and Tzatziki

(I'm sorry, I can't sing for you)

In the nineties we went to Crete to celebrate my late grandpa’s 70th birthday. We went to a kinda café-restaurant-ish place in a village he and my grandma had been to before. They instantly recognized him and after some pleasantries and most likely some customary Raki (booze, usually home-made), we decided to have dinner there that same evening. It wasn’t a big establishment. We had to decide what to eat so they could go kill it in time for dinner. You know, that sorta place. We decided on chicken and came back a couple of hours later. I vividly remember two things about that meal.

One. From the start the waiter was a bit… off I guess I’d say. The second time he came in… was he drunk? The third time, yes, decidedly drunk and now he also started to apologize profusely. He couldn’t sing to us you see, “I’m very sorry, I can’t sing for you… I’m so sorry”. After a while we understood that the village was in mourning. The waiter cried and apologized. No singing.

Quite surreal.

Two. The chicken and rice. Crispy, lemony, wonderfully roasted chicken with some kind of risotto-ish rice. Creamy and lemon-infused. It was all just really, really great.

So, back to Sweden. A bunch of years later, my dad started to make a lemon tasting, greek style chicken thing, but with potato instead of rice. I just assumed that this was a riff on that memorable meal. Turns out, it was from a recipe booklet he got from our part-greek cousins. That doesn’t really matter though. What matters is this: that chicken and potato is the bomb. And, ironically, the star of the show is the potato! Don’t get me wrong, the chicken is great, but I tend to think that roasted chicken can only be that good. The potato though… beyond great.

What’s also great with this dish is that it’s so, so simple. It needs some time in the oven but takes very little time to prepare.

Created with Sketch. 2 hours in total. 30 minutes preparation, circa 1.5 hours of cooking. Created with Sketch. 6-7 people

Ingredients

  • 1 large organic chicken (circa 1.5-2 kg)
  • 1.5 kgpotatoes
  • 2 lemons
  • 100 gbutter
  • 100 gwater (1 dl)
  • 700 gGreek (or Turkish) yogurt
  • 200 gsoured cream (this is a bit complicated, see below)
  • 1 cucumber
  • 2 cloves of garlic
  • 200 golive oil
  • 25 gvinegar (circa 1.5 tbsp)
  • Salt, pepper and oregano

Directions

If you’re feeling ambitious, I’d recommend you to brine the chicken over night. Dissolve approximately 60g of salt per one (1) liter of water. Put the raw chicken in the salt-water (the brine) and let it soak over night in the fridge. As the ion concentration in the brine is higher than the water in the meat, salty water will go into the chicken (osmosis) making it more juicy and naturally a bit salty (well… maybe a bit of a stretch to call it naturally). For pork, chicken (birds in general) and fish this is a really awesome trick.

One more thing. About that soured cream: in Sweden it’s called “gräddfil” and is very common. The closest international equivalent I’ve found seem to be soured cream but I’ve never actually tried it myself. Note that it isn’t the same thing as creme fraîche although that is fairly similar.

Gräddfil is about 12% fat, soured cream about 18% and creme fraîche is a lot fatter. If in doubt, just use more of the yogurt instead.

So, onwards to the instructions!

  1. Heat the oven to 220 C.
  2. Cut the potatoes into quite thick slices and put them in an oven tray. Pour 100g (1 dl) of olive oil over the potatoes. Turn the potatoes in the oil a couple of times thus that the potato slices are well covered in oil.
  3. Place the chicken on an oven grid and put the grid on top of the tray of potatoes.
  4. Press a lemon worth of lemon juice over the chicken, splash it with some olive oil and distribute 50g of butter across the skin of the chicken. Sprinkle some salt and black pepper over the chicken.
  5. Press the other lemon over the potatoes, pour the water into the oven tray and distribute the remaining 50g of butter amongst the potato slices.
  6. Sprinkle oregano quite generously over everything.
  7. Put into the oven for 30 minutes, then take the whole thing out, turn the potatoes and flip the chicken over (belly up). Put everything back into the oven for about 60 more minutes (depending a bit on the size of the chicken).
  8. Now you’re done with that! Over to the Tzatziki. Put the yogurt and the soured cream in a bowl.
  9. Grate the cucumber and press it to remove excess water. Press the garlic cloves and put the garlic and cucumber in with the yogurt.
  10. Add 100g of olive oil (1 dl) and the vinegar (1.5 tbsp) and mix everything together. Add salt and pepper to taste. Done!

 

Serve with a nice Greek salad and make sure to pour some of the juice from the oven tray over the chicken and potatoes on the plate. The roasted chicken dripping down into the lemon-butter-olive oil makes for a truly great dressing.

I hope I get to that original Crete dish some day. I’ve tried making it a couple of times but haven’t really been able to mimic the rice. In the meantime though? Eat this for christ’s sake.

Janssons frestelse

(maybe my favorite food... yes, of aaaaaall of the foods)

Well. It’s that time again. Christmas is coming.

I like Christmas I have to say. All in all, it’s mostly quite cosy and nice. There are things I LOVE about Christmas though. And maybe, just maybe, what I love the most is Jansson’s frestelse (sorry, all my family members, you’re a strong second).

According to folk lore it was invented by the opera singer Per Adolf “Pelle” Janzon, that used to treat his guests to beer, schnapps and this type of gratin (Wikipedia tells me the name might be from a movie with the same name. Let’s hope it’s not that boring).

It’s something so unusual as a completely Swedish dish (I don’t even think it’s got an international name) that I really think should be the envy of the world. It doesn’t seem to be though. I think very few people outside of Sweden have ever heard of it. But hey, up here, it’s one of the seminal holiday dishes. It is essential. It is culture. I’m not sure if people really like it that much though..? But I love it and that’s enough for me.

It’s a bit complicated to explain what ‘Jansson’ actually tastes like to non Swedish people. You see, in Sweden there are anchovies, but they’re not like anchovies in the rest of the world, which are usually salty and preserved in oil (they’re called “sardeller” in Sweden). The Swedish version is very sweet, pickled with a whole bunch of spices like cinnamon, bay leaves, allspice, black pepper, sandel wood, clove, cardamom and some version of oregano. And it’s not made from the fish “anchovy” either, but rather sprat. Crazy stuff, right? But it is the bomb. And these “Swedish anchovies” basically make the dish; the savory, sweet, fatty, salty, wonderfully decadent Janssons frestelse. I love everything about them. Even the can they come in is awesome!

In my family we eat (and always have eaten) Jansson’s on 100% of the following holidays: Christmas, Easter, Midsummer, and on 0% of all the other days. Or, well… sometimes my dad can’t help himself and makes it off-season with like twice the anchovies.

It’s also really easy to make, as all the spicing is already in the stuff you put into the gratin. No added spices, easy peasy.

Let’s go!

Created with Sketch. 45 minute preparation, ca 45 minutes in the oven Created with Sketch. 8-12 servings

Ingredients

  • 1.8 kgpotatoes
  • 3 yellow onions
  • 400 (or 500) gcream (40-ish %)
  • 3 (or 2)cans of anchovies (125 g per can, including the liquid)
  • 100 gbutter
  • 25 groe
  • 20 gtomato puré
  • 50 gbread crumbs

Directions

As you might have guessed, I like anchovy. So this recipe does not skimp on the anchovy. For some people this amount can be a bit much. If you think that you’re one of these people, you can skip one of the cans of anchovy and add about 100 g (1 dl) of cream instead.

  1. Put the oven on 225 C. Put a pan with 25 g of butter on medium heat. Chop half of the onions. When the butter starts to sizzle, lower the heat to medium/low and add the chopped onion. Fry until the onion starts to caramelize.
  2. While the onion is frying, peel the potatoes and cut them into sticks.
  3. Finely chop the rest of the onion. Open all three cans of anchovy and drain the pickle-juice into a bowl. Whatever you do: don’t throw it away! This is very important. It really packs a lot of flavor! Chop the anchovy from two of the cans. When the onion in the pan has caramelized somewhat, let it cool down off the stove in a bowl.


    I mean, just look at those… so pretty.
  4. Whisk the pickling juice, the roe and the tomato puré into the cream.

  5. Now you’re all set to put the pieces together. Layer potato sticks – raw and fried onion –  and pieces of anchovy, until you run out of ingredients.
  6. When you’re done with the layering, pour the cream/anchovy pickling juice/tomato puré/roe- mix on top.
  7. Now sprinkle the bread crumbs evenly over the surface.
  8. Distribute the remaining can of anchovy fillets on top of the layer of bread crumbs.
  9. And finally: slice the remaining butter (or better yet, use a cheese grater) and layer it on top of the anchovy fillets. 
  10. Into the oven it goes! It needs about 45 minutes but this is very dependent on the oven, the depth of the oven dish and to some extent the ingredients (like the type of potato). You’ll know it’s done when it’s golden brown, the cream is wonderfully gooey and the potatoes are soft. Check in now and then to time it perfectly. Let it rest out of the oven for at least 30 minutes before eating. As with many recipes, this is probably the most important and hardest part. But the gratin really has to set to let the ingredients meld. It’s also way tastier at something like 60 C than piping hot.

This is normally had at Christmas with tons of things as a part of the Christmas dinner behemoth. But it’s great with just some good ol’ meatballs and an egg.

Happy holidays!

Black Bean Moussaka

(greek goodness)

Well it’s not just Greek though right? It’s middle eastern, Turkish, Greek kinda. But you know what I mean. Anyway, this might be my favourite vegetarian dish.

Now, some might question why I’m posting a vegetarian version, instead of the meaty original, so let me just clarify: I absolutely adore the meat version. My cousins father was Greek, so a lot of the food in their mother’s (my aunts) house have always been very Greek.

The moussakas I’ve had there have been just… bonkers good.

So why the black beans? Well, my girlfriend is vegetarian and I just couldn’t stand not having moussaka frequently. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. But then, I just started liking it so much I’m not even sure which one I prefer any more…

So what’s the deal with moussaka anyway? As with many dishes it’s not one single thing. The corner stones of a great moussaka are the spicing, heavy with all-spice and possibly cinnamon (I say yes to cinnamon btw. My aunt says fuck no, so… don’t say no, say maybe, maybe, maybe, as a famous Swedish song goes), fried egg plant, and a creamy, egg-infused béchamel sauce with plenty of parmigiano!

A couple of things are, according to myself, crucially important.

  1. Deep frying the egg plant (and the potato if you choose to include it).
  2. Ample amounts of parmigiano in the béchamel.
  3. Lots of eggs in the béchamel.
  4. Daring to spice the bean stew. I think beans need heavier spicing than meat, so go for it.

Just stick to these and you’ll be ok. And the moussaka will be a lot more than ok.

Special Equipment

  • Deep fryer (you can manage without a dedicated fryer, but it's a bit tedious)
  • Kitchen thermometer
Created with Sketch. 3 hours Created with Sketch. 8 servings

Ingredients

  • For the bean stew
  • 500 grwater soaked black beans (excluding the weight of the water)
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 100 grchampignons
  • 2 clovesof garlic
  • 33 clbeer
  • 1 dlred wine
  • 6 grallspice
  • 3 grpaprika powder (smoked if you have it!)
  • 3 grkoriander seeds
  • 3 grcinnamon
  • 1 grblack pepper
  • 50 grchili sauce
  • 25 grsoy sauce (Japanese style, e.g. Kikkoman)
  • 10 grsriracha
  • Vinegar to taste
  • For the layers
  • 700 grpotato (7-9 medium sized potatoes)
  • 800 graubergines (two big ones)
  • For the egg-béchamel
  • 700 gmilk
  • 70 gflour
  • 40 gbutter
  • 1 yellow onion
  • 100 gparmigiano cheese
  • 5 eggs
  • 3 bay leaves
  • 5 piecesof clove
  • 6 gsalt
  • White peppar to taste

Directions

  1. Chop the mushroom and fry them with som oil in a pan on medium heat. While the mushroom are frying, finely chop the yellow onion and the garlic cloves. Add the onion chop when the mushroom have some color.
  2. Mix all of the spices (and salt) in a mortar. Add them into the pan with the black beans when the yellow onion starts to look a bit transparent. After a couple of minutes, also add the sriracha, soy, chili sauce, beer, wine and 3-4 deciliters of hot water.
  3. Let the mixture reduce on low to medium heat. Stir occasionally. When the consistency is gooey (not watery) but not dry, the bean stew is done! Balance the taste with vinegar and additional spicing to your liking.
  4. Do the béchamel while the bean stew is reducing. Start by putting a big pot on medium heat and adding in the butter. Finely chop the yellow onion and add it to the pot when it’s hot and the butter is sizzling.
  5. Put the flour in a bowl. Whisk about 30% of the milk into the flour, until no flour-lumps remain. Add the rest of the milk while stirring/whisking.
  6. Add the salt, som white pepper, the bay leaves and the clove. When the onion in the pot has softened, pour the milk-mix into the pan.
  7. Turn up the heat. Stir the bottom of the pan continuously with a flat wooden spoon. When the mixture starts thickening, lower the heat to low/medium heat and continue to stir. Grate the parmigiano.
  8. After a couple of minutes on low/medium heat (the mixture should simmer ever so slightly), add the parmigiano. When the cheese has melted into the sauce, take it of the stove and let it rest for 10-15 min.
  9. When the sauce has cooled down a bit of the stove, mix in the 5 eggs.
  10. Find and remove the bay leaves and clove and you’re done!
  11. Now for the tedious part – deep frying the aubergine & potato. Start by cutting the aubergine and potatoes into slices about 0.5 – 1 cm thick.
  12. Heat up a big pot of rapeseed oil (alt. sunflower oil) to 180 C. Make sure to have a thermometer to keep tabs on the temperature. Fry in batches. If you put to much in at the same time, the oil can boil over and/ or drop in temperature too much. When the potatoes/aubergine are golden, take them out of the oil and let them drip in a sieve or put them on paper towels. Wait for the temperature to get back to 180 C before starting a new batch.
  13. When done deep frying, salt the potato and aubergine slices. The level of saltiness should be about the sam as if you would eat them separately (maybe just a hair less). Turn the oven to 200 C.
  14. Cover the bottom of a deep (10-ish cm) oven dish with aubergine and potato slices. Spread a thin-ish layer of bean stew on top of this and then do another layer of aubergine and potato. Continue until you run out of ingredients.

  15. Finally, pour the egg-béchamel on top of all of it.
  16. Bake in the oven on 200 C for circa 30 minutes.
  17. Emerge perfection!
  18. So… now for the, by far, hardest part of this recipe.
    You have to leave the moussaka to rest for about 45 minutes out of the oven before eating. I mean… you really don’t have to, but I IMPLORE you. It is so much better lukewarm than piping hot and there is quite a lot of oil in this one so it stays hot for a good while. So plan for it to rest, you’ll not regret it!

Serve with a nice Greek sallad or maybe even some Tsatsiki!

Alternative Fish & Chips

(don't call it Cod)

Sometimes I feel like the Nordic Countries , when it comes to food, have these “gold-mine” products and they don’t even realize it, let alone make good use of it (or any use, sometimes). Take Baccalà, or Salted Cod, possibly my favorite fish: Norway is the biggest producer of this delicious stuff, and Norwegians don’t even know what it is, I asked! Swedes and Danes same thing, Finnish I don’t really care… Anyway, Baccalà is nothing else than Cod preserved in a lot of salt, so much so that it gets completely dry and hard and smells quite weird. Then you leave it in cold water for a couple of days and the magic happens: the salt melts, the water hydrates the fish again, and the Cod is back in all its white, tender magnificence, plus a delicious salty aftertaste and aroma. For some reasons Norway produces it, and then only sells it to Portugal, Italy and Spain: it’s an export-only product, which is insane.

In Italy Baccalà is cooked in a number of ways, but my favourite is deep-fried after being floured well. But to make things interesting I thought to give it the fish&chips treatment (or my personal version of it), with a proper beer and flour batter. I’m sure that if Britons realize that such thing as salted cod exist, they will ask themselves “why didn’t we think about this before!”. Because of course is way superior: the fish has this very peculiar salt taste (without being salty, unless you don’t desalt it enough), and a bit of a chewy consistency from the drying/re-hydrating process that is just a perfect combination. Of course if you don’t live in Italy, or Portugal, or Spain, you won’t be able to find it easily, but around Christmas I spotted it in one of the fancy markets in Stockholm, and at a price that wasn’t completely unreasonable, which means there’s hope for everybody.

To make the recipe really “alternative fish&chips” here I propose sweet potatoes fries as a side; sweet potatoes fries are one of my ongoing experiments, trying to achive an as-crispy-as-possible fry, given that sweet potatoes will always remain a bit mushy because they just won’t behave, with all their high moisture and low starch ratio. But I’m getting closer…

Special Equipment

  • kitchen thermometer

Ingredients

  • 250 gdesalted Baccalà (I guess you can use Cod if you really can't find the real deal)
  • for the batter:
  • 100 gflour
  • 1 cancold beer
  • 1/2 teaspoonground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoondry parsley
  • 1 teaspoongarlic powder
  • 1/2 teaspoonCayenne pepper
  • saltto taste
  • vegetable oilfor deep-frying
  • for the fries:
  • 1 sweet potato

Directions

A couple of things that you might want to know before you start this recipe. The fish should be at room temperature before cooking it, especially since we’re deep-frying it, or it won’t get cooked evenly.
Do not use a lager beer if possible, better be something with a good structure, possibly hoppy but not too bitter; and use it very cold, this is important for the final crispiness of the crust.

  1. If you’re using Cod, because of course you’re a very lazy person and you can’t be bothered to go out and find some Baccalà at your local market, then you can jump to step #2. Otherwise you might need to desalt the fish (you can also find it already desalted, but it’s always good to know how to do it). It’s quite simple: first you wash the Baccalà under running water to get rid of the excess salt, than with a good knife you cut it into portion-pieces, finally you just leave it in a bowl of abundant cold water for 24 hours, changing the water once every 8 hours; if it’s a very thick piece, you might need a bit more time. You can actually taste the raw fish to check if it’s still too salty or not.
  2. Prepare the batter. Mix the flour, the spices and the beer; add the beer a little at the time until the batter reaches the correct consistency, not too liquid and not to thick (mix it well, you want to eliminate any flour lumps). You can of course drink the beer left while you procede with the recipe.
  3. In a deep pan, or in a fryer, or in a wok (this is my weapon of choice usually) heat an abundant amount of oil (we want to deep-fry here!) to a temperature between 170° and 190°. Use you kitchen thermometer for this, it’s very important that the oil is not too hot (if it goes over the smoking point it will burn everything, plus is very bad for your health) or not enough (in which case the fish will become like a sponge for the oil). Dry the fish with a paper towel and gently immerse it into the batter coating it well, and very carefully lower it in the hot oil, one piece at the time. It will only need to cook for 4 or 5 minutes, until it gets a nice golden and crisp crust.
  4. And the sweet potatoes! Well let’s do it  the simple way for now. Just cut the potatoes in typical fries wedges, and fry them in the same oil you used for the fish, making sure the oil temperature stays around 160° C. The potatoes will reach a nice golden-brown color in 5/7 minutes. Make sure to eat them as soon as they’re ready, to keep some of the hard-to-maintain crispiness.