bacalao a la vizcaina.

The bacalao is ready today, this is what I'm doing with it.

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AND: I kind of fucked it up. Missed an important ingredient, a cup of water.

Actually, there were a couple problems: the recipe above is for skinless, deboned bacalao, and mine, as you can tell from the pic above, still had the skin on (sadly gorgeous, I rarely get emotional about my fish, but I was caught off-guard by how, mmm, alive the skin was, sorry), and as you can't tell, it had plenty of bones.

So I kind of had to shred my bacalao in order to make sure it was boneless, and that meant that it couldn't really be "fried in chunks" as the recipe specified. Things kind of went downhill from there: I skipped a step, which led me to forget the cup of water, etc. etc. etc.

It's still completely edible, in other words I'm eating it, but yeah it's just way too concentrated...that blasted cup of water.

I could see trying something like this again maybe, but with a regular whitefish, not the ol' bacalao.

And will I ever try to cook with bakkeljauw/bacalao again? Yeah, probably: there's something attractive about the ritual, and the taste/texture is unique. Fuck the cod stocks.

I'm kidding, mostly. One last thing I should mention for future reference: every Surinamese recipe I saw had you de-salt the cod for a ridiculously short period of time compared to the Spanish or Italian recipes I was using, like 20 minutes vs. 2 days. Soooo....I don't know. More research necessary if we do this again.

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