Caribana week ahead: Saltfish and bakes

This summer, I'm generally doing the cooking Mondays through Wednesdays, and this week in particular, I've chosen a theme of traditional West Indian dishes to work with. Now, I could just make the foods I already know how to do -- Cook-up rice, Pepperpot, Macaroni and cheese, Curry -- but what fun is that! So instead, I found recipes for stuff I love to eat but haven't yet tried making (or made on my own, in the case of today's dish).





For this evening, I did Saltfish and Bakes. In my family, this was usually more of a breakfast dish, but it's fairly light and I thought it would make a nice summer dinner. Plus, bonus 1) I had bought saltfish a while back thinking to make this, but it's been sitting neglected in my fridge since then, so now I can use it up! and bonus 2) thanks to one of my girlfriends, and also to the restaurant where we had our Socasize classes, I had a craving for it. Nonsense knows that the mere idea of a whiff or mention of a given food can have me craving it. It's not really surprising.

I started by writing out the recipe -- I find it better for me to work from recipes than to just memorize stuff. I forget steps easily, and it may mean I'll never make true chef! status, but as long as I and those I cook for like my food, I'm happy to let this aspect of my cookery remain a little dull.

Then I gathered my ingredients together and prepped some of them that needed it, so that I'd have them handy rather than running around the kitchen with my head cut off. Nonsense informed me that this is a technique used by chefs, called Mise en place, which makes sense. I used a technique! Maybe I will be a chef some day! ;) I find it helpful for a happy cooking process -- as well as for the eating later -- to have everything ready to hand and already measured. In particular, this recipe requires a few dishes being made at once, one of which is to be deep fried in hot oil, which always causes me a bit of anxiety. Better to get all the other anxiety-inducing factors out of the way then.

So, for the bakes, we have:

• flour
• salt
• baking powder
• sugar
• water
• oil for cooking

And for the saltfish:

• salt cod
• tomatoes
• onion
• lemon (for just a little bit of lemon juice)
• scallions
• garlic
• thyme
• oil for cooking

One interesting thing (to me) I noted was that there is a definite visual difference between salt and sugar.

 

Sugar is kind of sparkly where salt is duller. Hmm!

Note the ready-made garlic paste -- courtesy of Nonsense and his Colossal Garlic

So with everything together and prepared (I cut up the tomatoes and onion as well before beginning), the first thing to do, and one of the most important, was to boil the salt off the fish. I'm told that letting it soak overnight in cold water is a better way to desalt salt meat, but I just don't have that sort of patience or foresight. So, I boiled the it thrice (Weird Sister? Why yes!) and then shredded it with forks.

While the fish was boiling, I made the bake dough, mixing the dry ingredients together with a fork, and then squishing it all together with enough of the water to make a nice soft dough, which stiffened after standing for a few minutes.

Then everything was ready for the final push. Time to fire up the hot grease in heavy metal pans! Yikes! Actually though, aside from a brief moment where the deep fat was too hot for the bakes (I burned a few but they tasted okay), it all went unusually smoothly!

So here it is, the finished product, just before Nonsense and I dug in.

Once we finished, there was still at least a serving of both saltfish and the bakes left over. The bakes were tougher and denser than I would have liked. Have to see if I can find out how to make them a bit lighter. Shallower pan/oil? More baking powder? Longer rising time? Less (or more) kneading? I really don't know much about the chemistry behind this stuff (another reason I have a long way to go from "cook" to "chef"!) so maybe I'll just have to try a few different things and see if something changes.

In the end, I'm quite proud of my first West Indian theme week dish!

Coming up:

• Beef patties
• Garlic pork