Catalonia · Salad
Esqueixada de Bacallà
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, a briny, maritime salinity.
Ingredients
- 300 g salt cod loin, thick cut
- 250 g ripe tomatoes, diced
- 100 g sweet onion, sliced as thin as paper
- 1/2 green pepper, sliced thin
- 60 g small black olives
- 60 ml Arbequina olive oil
- 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
- black pepper
The skills inside
Soaking dried goods back to lifeSalting to draw the water out
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Rinse the crust of salt off the cod, then soak it submerged in cold water in the fridge, changing the water four times, until a raw shred tastes seasoned rather than salty.
- Drain and press the loin dry in a cloth, then pull it apart with your fingers, following the grain, into rough splinters. Do not touch it with a knife.
- Salt the diced tomato lightly, let it sit ten minutes and pour off the water it gives up, so the salad cannot go slack.
- Toss the cod with the oil first, coating every shred, then add the tomato, onion, green pepper and olives and only then the vinegar. Grind over black pepper.
- Rest 15 minutes, then taste before adding any salt at all. The cod almost always brings enough. 15 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes
- Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
- Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
- Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
- That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
- The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.
Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Fino or Manzanilla Sherry
- Also Right
- Muscadet or dry Riesling
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
Salt-cured fish wants a bone-dry, saline partner: Sherry and Atlantic whites answer the cure without fighting it.
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