Cod Croquettes

I went fishing at my local market and I came back with a lot of salt cod, one of the all time Greek favorite fish. This is a piece of dried salt cod filet packed in coarse salt. It was basically a way to preserve the fish. You have to desalt it and rehydrate it before you use it. So here it is soaking in water. It’s been in the water for a couple of days. You want to change that water every couple of hours. You want to cut it into smaller pieces and take off the skin. The smaller pieces make it a little bit more manageable. I boiled the cleaned, skinned, desalted salt cod for a couple of minutes at 5 or 7 minutes, basically just to soften it up a little bit. The first thing I’m going to do is just shred the poached cod a little bit. See how easily it comes apart. It might seem a little ironic that cod is such a popular fish in Greece. It’s not a native of the Mediterranean or the Aegean. It’s a cold water fish. For a long time, salt cod was called mountain fish because it used to be sold by itinerant merchants in villages far from the coast. This is beautiful. Done. The first thing that goes into this is a slightly beaten egg. The egg is the binder. It’s what will hold the croquettes together. My onion. Next, a little parsley baking soda which makes the croquettes really fluffy and I’m just going to mix that all together. I want to do this carefully. Let me just taste a little bit of this to see if it needs any salt and it doesn’t, but it does need a little pepper. Next, flour. Just enough to hold this together. So I’ll start with about half of this. Mix it all together. The mixture ends up being quite sticky, which is OK, That’s exactly what we want. Sometimes you just have to get in there with your hands. Let’s see if that’s holding together. That’s beautiful. Exactly what we want. We want the croquettes to hold together, keep their shape. I like to make the fritters on the small side and I shape them into little oblong croquettes. You want to make sure they’re all about the same size so that they fry up evenly. Whenever you’re frying something, especially croquettes, you want to make sure the oil is nice and hot. You could just use a little piece of bread, and as soon as it sizzles up like that, you know your oil is hot enough to fry up the croquettes one at a time into the frying pan carefully. You don’t want to crowd the frying pan, so you don’t want the temperature of the oil to drop. That will make the croquettes greasy. You want them to be nice and crisp on the outside. These only take a couple of minutes aside. Yeah, that is beautiful. Perfect. Look at that beautiful golden color. I’m just going to finish frying these. They’re almost done. And then I’m going to enjoy them with that beautiful Scordalia and my glistening beats. There’s always time to stop and smell the garlic, especially when it’s in a plate as delicious as this. I can’t wait to try this. My COD cathethes, they’re so light, not at all salty, just really well seasoned. They have that beautiful herbaceousness from all that parsley. Let me try my beet greens here. I love the tartness of the red wine vinegar on this. It really brings these greens to life and I can’t help but want to save my score than ya for last with a tiny little bit of beet. And of course bread. We eat everything with bread that is not for the faint of heart. Wow, it’s so earthy. The walnuts give it that earthiness and crunch. The olive oil makes it really smooth and gratifying. The potatoes and the bread make it very comforting. And that beautiful sweet acidity of the balsamic ties everything together. For something this robust and garlicky, it’s incredibly satisfying. These flavors are so pungent. That’s why cod skordalia beats with garlic. And my beautiful greens go really well with the wine that can stand up to them. A nice light chilled resina. If you’ve ever wondered what to pair with pine scented ratzina, this is pretty much it. All sorts of different things. Sweet beetroot, garlic escordaglia, crisp cod fritters, mild beet greens. All of these disparate flavors and textures come together because of the uniqueness of this traditional Greek wine. You see he on.