Croquetas

In virtually every Spanish tapas bar or restaurant, croquetas figure among the most ubiquitous of menu items.  And happily so: in most places, they’re very good — what’s not to like about little fried butter-flour cylinders with bits of ham inside, all warm and salty?  They are inherently beverage-friendly, and go well with just about any wine, white or red, you might be drinking.   And yet,  in some restaurants they are sensationally superior, and when that happens it’s a revelation: the familiar friend instantly gets elevated to star status!

Here at Rendezvous, we make a batch of croquetas every Monday for our tapas bar menu.  As is usually the case, we put our individual spin on the classic preparation.  The flavorings are something of a hybrid combination: salt cod AND potato AND Virginia ham.  And as far as the technique goes, we departed somewhat from the usual approach and intuited our way to a delicious result.  Here’s how we did it:

A little kitchen science, and how experience is a wonderful thing when tinkering around in the kitchen

Most Spanish cookbooks explain that croquetas are made of a thick béchamel batter, with flavorings.  What is béchamel?  It’s a sauce/thickener made of scalded milk, flour and butter.  It can be enriched towards the end of cooking by the addition of some eggs or cheese.  However, in approaching this preparation here, I was wary of the most common fault of these savory little fritters:  underdone and slightly gooey in the middle when served.

To help guard against this problem, I resorted to another traditional French recipe, pâte-à-choux pastry, which is also a combination of milk, flour, butter and eggs, and then baked.  The most common use of this pastry is for éclairs and cream puffs, but a savory version also exists in French cooking, gougères, that includes grated cheese and sometimes fresh herbs.  Because I had experimented earlier in my career with frying choux pastry,  I already had a feeling that we were on the right track.

Inspired by another traditional Spanish combination, salt cod and potato, I decided to take it one step further.  I baked a couple of russet potatoes in the oven, in their skins, so that the flesh would be cooked through but dried out slightly, much in the same way that we do when preparing potatoes for our gnocchi.  I scooped the potato flesh out and added it to the choux pastry batter along with the poached and drained salt cod and the bits of chopped Virginia ham (childhood sentiment), and voilà: we nailed it on the very first try!  The potato helped bridge the gap between too gooey on one end and too eggy on the other.

We roll this dough into little balls and roll them in finely ground toasted breadcrumbs before frying them briefly.  We serve them with some lightly spiced mayonnaise.  Warm, crispy, salty and tasty — what’s not to love?