bacalhau à brás - take 1
Paulo introduced me to bacalhau à brás back in June when I stayed with him in Portugal, and I’m only just NOW getting around to making it like I said I would. I asked him about the ingredients and he gave me an instructional refresher over the phone while I grocery shopped near the end of my walk home. The main ingredients are below… (I skipped shooting the onions and the egg)
salted cod was easier to find than I thought
salted cod bits sounds a bit dirty, doesn't it?
Italian parsley
I know what you’re thinking: that’s it? So what’s the Canadian part? It looks pretty straightforward.
However, the second main ingredient in this Portuguese dish (home cooking; their version of our mac and cheese) is something we don’t quite have: potato sticks. The closest thing we have to their potato sticks is hickory sticks, which Paulo had to look up because I couldn’t describe hickory (can anyone?).
hickory smoked bacalhau?
I thought I’d try it, anyway. Hopefully the hickory won’t overpower the dish.
The bulk of the labour and time in preparing bacalhau à brás is preparing the cod: shredding it, de-salting it, and picking out the bones. That’s most of the work right there. I could’ve let it soak longer, but I was impatient and more than a little hungry. While the cod was boiling I had to guess how much of the salt I’d gotten rid of in the process and guess how much saltier the hickory sticks would make of it. The other difference is the version I made in Portugal had olives in it, but I couldn’t find any where I went to get the rest of the ingredients so I left those out.
Once the bacalhau à brás was finished, I could taste the hickory. But the flavour blended in soon after that and now it’s barely noticeable, but I’ll have to get an independent opinion. For now, I am happily surprised it turned out so well!
