Bacalao Stuffed Piquillos in Basque Sauce: richer, for two

We've been making this for years based on the book by Teresa Barrenechea: The Basque Table. Irene said the sauce overwhelmed the dish and that she wanted more fish with larger chunks in the peppers. This revised recipe addresses those desires, and scales it for a dinner for two. 

We're scaling some of the proportions based on ingredients we can find here. For example, instead of the dried salt cod at 24€/Kg, we can use half a bag of frozen Bacalao de Punto de Sal which is just 6€/Kg and doesn't require hydration to de-salt. The Pequillos come in 220 mg jar and ours contained 11 peppers. I had one Choricero pepper, not enough, so I added a Ñora. A pastry bag really simplifies stuffing the peppers, but a zip-top bag with corner cut off should work, or you can use a spoon if you're a masochist.

Stuffed and sauced, before baking

Bacalao Béchamel

250 g      Bacalao del Punto de Sal, frozen

 40 ml     Olive Oil

 20 g      Flour

175 g      Milk

Chop the Bacalao into pea-sized chunks, this is easier while it's still partially frozen.

Sauté on high heat in 40 ml Olive Oil to drive off water, about 5 minutes.

Add Flour and cook off the raw edge on medium, about 5 minutes.

Add Milk and continue cooking until it's noticeably thicker; you don't want it pour-able when hot.

Load a pastry bag with the filling, making sure its snout is big enough to accommodate the Bacalao chunks; let cool while you make the Sauce in the same skillet.

Basque Sauce

The original recipe hydrates dried Spanish chilis, but here we can find jars of Choricero and Ñora flesh ("carne") which is convenient if you haven't planned ahead.

 14 g      Choricero or Ñora Peppers, dried, or 150 g jar "carne"

165 g      Onion, 1 small to medium, diced

 30 ml     Olive Oil

  2 cloves Garlic

 15 g      Tomato (1/4 small)

           Salt

Seed the Chili Peppers and hydrate 8 hours; you can also simmer in hot water for about 30-60 minutes if needed. Keep the hydrating water. Roughly chop the Chilis.

Sauté the Onion in the 30 ml Olive Oil until soft.

Add the Garlic, Chilis, and Tomato, and continue to cook until the Garlic is soft; it's fine if the Onions take on a bit of color.

Transfer to the jar of a stick blender and whiz to make a sauce. You may need to add some of the reserved Chili hydration water to thin it enough -- that's fine, it has flavor. 

Taste and adjust Salt. 

If the Sauce is too thin, return it to the skillet and cook down to thicken.

Assembly

10-12  Pequillo Peppers, whole, from 290 g gross / 220 g net jar

Preheat the oven to 200C.

Drain the Pequillos and arrange on a plate; I find it handy to put a shot glass in the center to hold the Pequillos as I'm stuffing them.

Fill the Pequillos with the Bacalao Béchamel using the pastry bag.

Spoon about a third of the Sauce into an oven proof baking dish.

Arrange the stuffed Pequillos around the dish and top with the remaining Sauce.

Bake for 15-30 minutes so everything's hot.

Serve.

Gâteau Basque #2

I made Gâteau Basque once before with an unusual technique that required piping the base and top in a spiral; it was a nuisance but I see Spanish Sabores does it the same way. This time, I want to avoid that fuss and make a more standard pastry top and bottom, like NY Times (paywall) and Serious Eats do; like Serious Eats, I'll fill with both jam and pastry cream; I've got an excess of marmalade so I'll use that instead of traditional black cherry. Here in Barcelona, I don't have my old stand mixer, so I'll make the pastry by hand, as shown in this traditional preparation video which I found on the Fête du Gâteau Basque official site, and also this video with clear quantities and technique. I'm starting from the Serious Eats recipe, including their Pastry Cream.

When I made this, I let the Pastry butter warm up, and was not able to get the sandy texture -- it congealed. But I chilled it and reworked a bit later, and it still turned out well.  My cake pan has a 20 cm (8 inch) interior with 4 cm steep sides, and 24 cm across at the top. The quantities of Pastry and fillings below worked well for this. The Almond "flour" is actually very finely ground almonds, not as fine as wheat flour. 

Pastry

250 g      Flour

 50 g      Almond "Flour"

150 g      Sugar

  4 g      Baking Powder [I had only 3.2g]

pinch      Salt

210 g      Butter, unsalted, cold, cut into 1cm cubes

  1 large  Egg (50g [mine was 59 g]), cool

In a large bowl, whisk Flour, Almond Flour, Baking Powder, Salt, and Sugar.

Mix in half the cubed Butter, and rub the butter into the flour; add the rest of the Butter, and continue rubbing in to get a sandy texture; see the video for clear technique.

Add 1 Egg, and again mix by hand, then knead into a smooth ball; it should be soft and sticky.

Divide in two portions, one slightly larger than the other for the bottom; shape into flat disks, wrap each in plastic wrap, and refrigerate 3 hours or overnight.

Pastry Cream

455 g      Whole Milk

           Orange Zest from one Orange (microplane)

115 g      Sugar

 30 g      Cornstarch

pinch      Salt

  4        Egg Yolks (70g)

 30 g      Butter, unsalted, cold, cut into 1cm cubes

2.5 ml     Vanilla Extract (1/2 tsp)

Infuse Orange Zest in Milk by combining in a pot, bring to bare simmer, then cover and steep for 30 minutes. Because this is hot, you'll need to temper the egg mixture.

Make an ice bath to chill the Pastry Cream and set aside.

In heatproof bowl, whisk the Sugar, Cornstarch, Salt; whisk in Egg Yolks until smooth, pale yellow, and fluffy -- about 1 minute.

My Infused Milk threatened to separate so I blitzed with a stick blender.
Slowly whisk the warm Infused Milk into the Egg mixture to temper it.

Return to sauce pan, cook over medium heat while whisking continuously until it begins to thicken (at 80C), about 5 minutes. 

Continue whisking, pausing every few seconds to check for bubbles; when they appear, set a timer and whisk continuously for 1 minute; this neutralizes starch-dissolving egg proteins.

Off heat, whisk in butter until melted and thoroughly combined.

Strain through fine sieve into heat proof bowl; I skipped this as I want the fine zest in my filling.

Put film directly on surface to prevent skinning, and transfer to an ice bath  to chill 30 minutes, then refrigerate until cold, about 2 hours or overnight.

Whisk in the Almond (Vanilla) Extract.

Whisking eggs into sugar

Assembly, Baking

200 g      Marmalade, room temperate to ease spreading

  1 large  Egg (50g) for wash

 15 ml     Milk for wash

Preheat oven to 180C (350F).

Grease 20 cm (8 inch) cake pan with butter and hold in refrigerator.

Whisk the Pastry Cream with an electric whisk, egg beaters, or regular whisk to fluff it up.

Remove dough disks from fridge; you'll need to let them warm up for 15-30 minutes so you can roll out the dough.

Spread film or parchment on a counter, then place the larger dough disk it, and cover with film or parchment; roll it out to 28 cm -- enough to cover bottom and sides of cake pan. 

Store covered in film/parchment in fridge while you work on the next one.

Repeat rolling out the smaller disk for the top, rolling to 24 cm between film/parchment; store in fridge.

Remove the larger disk and transfer to greased cake pan, gently pressing into corners, and running it up the sides.

Add Marmalade and smooth out.

Add Pastry Cream and spread evenly on top of the jam.

Remove smaller disk from fridge and transfer to cake pan to cover the filling.

My filling did not come up to the top of the pan, so I pressed the edges of the top to the bottom where it ran up the sides, then folded it over to the center to seal.

Whisk 1 Egg with the 15 ml Milk and brush top.

Use tines of fork to create a traditional diagonal crosshatch pattern.

Use a knife to cut a few small air vents along the crosshatch lines.

Bake 45 minutes at 180C (350F) until cake is puffed and deep golden brown

Let cool completely, about 2 hours.

Loosen edges with a knife, invert, then invert again onto serving platter.

Slice and serve.

Marmalade on bottom, left side; lots of pastry cream on top, crumbly cake-y top

Next Time...

I'll use cold butter for the pastry, as I've corrected in the instructions above.

The bottom is a little wet; can I warm up the jam and spread it on top of the pastry cream?

Bacalao Pil Pil sous vide: streamlined without oil in the bag

We've been making Bacalao Pil Pil in the US for years, and now that we're living in Barcelona, we have easy access to quality Bacalao. We hit upon a couple YouTube videos that streamline our sous vide technique by eliminating the oil from the sous vide bag when cooking the fish so we don't need to separate it from the fish liquid. We've made two variations that are very promising; we're zeroing in on a streamlined technique with terrific results.

There are multiple attempts in this post, scan down to find the latest findings and techniques. Sadly, I didn't take photos for most of these.

Streamlining: no oil in the sous vide bag

This first video (predating my sous vide technique) was done in 2015 and is cooked at 65C for 30 minutes, using the same strainer-in-skillet technique I used to create an emulsion from the exuded fish liquid. In the next, from 2020, the chef cooks at 48C for 20-30 minutes without oil, then drains off the fish elixir and emulsifies it quickly with a stick blender, then adds the oil. He cooks the garlic in oil in a jar in the same bath as the fish, so he doesn't even need a sauté pan. The last, from 2021, cooks at 60C for 20 minutes, again without oil. She too drains off the elixir into a cup and creates the emulsion with a stick blender, adding in the garlic-oil to build the sauce.

The temperatures above are 48C, 60C, and 65C; I think 48C (118F) is too low for "cooked" fish, but want to avoid overcooking it, so we'll pick a middling 55C (131F). Times ranged from 20 to 30 minutes, and we'll go with the higher end to make sure our relatively thick loin cuts are cooked through.

Both are portions for two, but the first is a bit meager since you lose some weight to the fish liquid.

First Try: too garlicky

250 g      Bacalao lomo, cut into 2 pieces for serving
  2 clove  Garlic, sliced thin
 80 ml     Extra Virgin Olive Oil

De-salt the Bacalao by washing the salt off, and putting in a bowl of water. Change it twice a day for two days, then once again the morning you're going to cook.

I bagged the Bacalao (without the frozen olive oil I used to use) and cooked sous vide 30 minutes at 55C / 131F. I put the Garlic and Oil in a ziptop bag and put it in the bath as well to infuse the oil and cook the garlic (or not!).

As expected, the fish liquid was easy to pour into the cup of a stick blender; I kept the fish warm in its bag in the bath.

I added the Garlic from the Oil bag and blitzed with with a stick blender. After it turned creamy white, I drizzled in the Oil. I think I added some Salt and that was too much. It didn't thicken as much as I'd like but had a light cream texture like I'd seen in the videos.

Plate the fish, top with the sauce.

Oh, my! That garlic was pretty raw, way too hot and unpleasant even for me; it was also too salty. Clearly, the garlic cannot cook enough in a 55C bag in 30 minutes, let alone the 48C bath the chef used. I would have preferred the sauce a bit thicker, but not as thick as the mayonnaise consistency I'd been making in the US. 

I kept the excess sauce in a baggie in the fridge for a few days for another attempt.

Second Try: tamed garlic, bacalao al punto de sal

I used some frozen Bacalao al Punto de Sal; this is fresh cod that's been brined with "just enough salt", then frozen. It's handy if you haven't planned ahead for the real thing.

360 g  Bacalao al punto de sal, frozen
       Leftover sauce from previous batch with too much garlic and salt

I divided the Bacalao between two bags, sealed, and cooked them sous vide -- again at 55C for 30 minutes. 

The pil pil sauce from the previous batch had gelled in the fridge, probably from the protein or collagen in the fish elixir. To tame the garlic, I cooked it in a small sauce pan on low, whisking occasionally; the texture seemed to stay the same. After a while, I turned up the heat to medium and let it bubble just a bit, and whisked again -- wow, it quickly developed a delightful light mousse-y texture.

I plated and sauced. As expected, this fresh-frozen cod did not have the intriguing funk of salt-cured Bacalao, and the texture seemed a little mushy compared to the real thing.

The sauce was a terrific texture, light and fluffy, not like thin cream nor thick mayonnaise: really great. The garlic had been tamed as desired: still assertive but very edible. It was still too salty but we can fix that next time.

We didn't use the liquid that was exuded from this fish because we didn't need it. I noticed it didn't seem to be a cloudy suspension like salt-cured bacalao provides, but more a separate clear liquid with flecks of white protein mixed through. It also did not turn to gel in the fridge like the salt-cured elixir. I suspect it will not make a creamy emulsion when blended, but it's worth a try.

What we learned, improvements for next time

Garlic cannot be cooked sufficiently in our sous vide temperatures and times. Next time, cook the garlic in oil in a sauce pan on low while the bacalao is in the bath; when cooked (but not browned), remove the garlic and save it to build the emulsion with the fish liquid. Keep the oil warm for the pil pil sauce.

If blitzing the elixir with garlic and drizzling in the oil doesn't make as thick a pil pil sauce as you'd like, heat it in a pan on medium and fluff with a manual whisk. Hold the fish in the bath its bag so it stays warm for service.  Don't add salt to the pil pil sauce, it'll have plenty from the fish.

2024-01-23 Pil Pil Espuma

This version learns from the above and is the simplest yet. However, I used an electric whisk to create the Pil Pil and it fluffed up into an espuma (foam) that was almost identical to whipped egg whites in texture; it was fun and unusual, but too fluffy to be a proper sauce. I think there may other interesting applications, but this veers too far from tradition -- Basque grandmothers would be spinning in their graves if they saw it.  

Pil Pil was an espuma rather than a sauce; served with fried polenta

300 g      Bacalao loin, cut in two pieces

 80 ml     Olive Oil

  2 clove  Garlic, lightly smashed, peeled

Hydrate the Bacalao and desalt over 2-3 days in water, changed daily.

Put the fish in a sous vide bag and seal on "wet" setting so it doesn't squeeze the fish.

Cook sous vide 30 minutes at 55C.

Meanwhile, heat the Garlic in the Oil on very low to extract flavor without browning garlic much.

When the time is up, drain the fish liquid into a stick blender jar; hold the fish in the bag in the hot sous vide bath for service.

Add the Garlic to the blender jar and whip with an electric whisk: it will froth up like a meringue; while whipping, drizzle in the infused Oil -- ours turned became a fluffy espuma rather than a sauce.

Plate the fish and top with the espuma sauce.

Next time, try using the regular stick blender blade rather than the whisk to discourage rabid foaming.

Use a larger weight of fish, this was a bit meager. 

2024-03-25 Blend instead of whisk

I buy a large high-quality Bacalao loin when they're on sale: they keep a long time in the fridge. I cut a 640 g piece in half for this, and the resulting 325 g piece was enough for two people with a large side dish. The pil pil was not an espuma this time, it was creamy after I thickened it a bit over heat.

Bacalao Pil Pil and Black Garlic, with sautéed Artichokes

325 g      Bacalao loin, cut into two serving pieces

 80 ml     Olive Oil

  2 clove  Garlic, peeled, sliced

  2 clove  Black Garlic, sliced, for garnish (optional)

Rehydrate the bacalao, bag and seal it, and cook 30 minutes at 55C.

Meanwhile, heat the Garlic in Oil on very low.

Pour the liquid from the sous vide bag into a stick blender jar with the Garlic and blend.

Drizzle in the Oil while stick blending.

If it's too thin, add it to the pot used for the Oil and whip with a hand whisk until it thicken.

Plate the Bacalao, top with the Pil Pil, garnish with Black Garlic.

I had extra Pil Pil which I put in the fridge. The next day, it firmed up like a mousse and was quite tasty. It made for a fine topping on earthy bread topped with smoked salmon, and I'll use it on Arroz Negro tonight.

Bacalao Pil Pil Sous Vide -- in our Barcelona apartment

In our last episode with Bacalao, we found that we could get the "elixir" -- the emulsifier for the pil pil sauce -- efficiently using minimal oil using a sous vide technique, and subsequent experiments showed we could even do this with Mahi Mahi, at lower temperature.

We recently moved to Barcelona, where Bacalao is everywhere, and  restaurants have special machines to agitate the fish in oil to create the emulsion. We brought our first-generation sous vide machine by Sansaire -- even though it only ran on US-style 115VAC 60Hz: we got a step-down transformer to convert Spain's 230VAC to 115VAC, and hoped the 50Hz frequency wouldn't bother the motor too much. 

Tonight's dinner proved a success, using local bacalao and the hacked sous vide setup. We also discovered that using a even lower temperature works, and have suggestions for improvement.

Bacalao with emulsived sauce, served with potatoes and bulbing onions from the plancha

For a previous dinner here, we got some salted, dried bacalao from our local supermarket. The person in front of us got all coveted loins ("Estalvi!",  "saving!"), so we picked up a couple filets. We rehydrated them over a couple nights in the fridge and used half of it for one dinner, and froze the rest which we used tonight. The proportions below are what we had, and what we did; in the epilog, we suggest adjustments.

280 g      Bacalao filets, skin on, hydrated
pinch      Cayenne pepper flakes
2 cloves Garlic, sliced
120 ml    Olive Oil and Corn Oil mix (we ran out of Olive Oil)

Bag everything in a zip-top and place in a sous vide bath at 55C/130F for 30 minutes. I turned and agitated the bag every 5 minutes or so to make sure everything was distributed well.

How embarrassing: 135F, not 55C

Pour the oil and the critical milky white liquid that collected in the bag, the "elixir" (which I believe is a weak gelatin from under the skin of the fish, or at least in its flesh) into a tall glass and let it settle out. Use a turkey baster to pull the milky liquid from under the oil and put in a pan on medium heat.

Keep the bacalao in its bag in the still-hot water bath, with the power turned off, so it stays warm for service.

Use a stock skimmer or similar to whip air into the elixer. This time, mine was quite thin, so I had the heat on our induction cooker high enough to barely simmer the liquid to reduce it a bit. Bubbles begin to form as I whisked air into it, and after a while, I bravely added some of the reserved oil: it started to combine into an emulsion -- success! I continued whisking and adding oil to build the emulsion and developed one as thick as mayonnaise, so I added a bit of lemon juice and wine, and a dash of salt, and finished when I'd used all the oil. 

Thickened emulstion 

Plate the fish, top with emulsified sauce and sliced garlic from the bag, and serve. Some parsley would have helped here.

Results

I was happy to see the milky white "elixir" in the bag after about 15 minutes, but when I poured it into the pan, it seemed really thin. It appeared to be the hydrating water from the bacalao, and I was worried it wouldn't turn into an emulsion. But after bumping up the heat to a bare simmer and continuing to whisk, it did thicken a bit and bound the oil just fine.

The fish was a bit salty, which was a result of under-hydrating the dried bacalao, not this process.

The flesh of the fish flaked, like you'd expect cod to do, but required just a bit more force than I'd like. It was still moist, so reducing the temperature from 60C/140F to 55C/135F was a good move -- and we still got the elixir. 

There was more emulsified sauce than we needed for the fish, and it was quite thick despite thinning with wine and lemon juice. It complemented the potatoes Irene cooked on the plancha quite well, so nothing was wasted.

Next Time

When hydrating dried bacalao, take a sample, cook it, check the saltiness, and hydrate longer if needed; don't over hydrate or it will become bland. Ours was too salty but by this point it was too late to adjust. Our fish mongers will helpfully hector us about the right duration to hydrate and the number of changes of water we need: listen to them, and test for taste!

Keep the cooking temperature at 55C to preserve the moistness, but increase the time from 30 to 45 or maybe 60 minutes to allow it to flake more easily.

Cut the oil for the emulsion in half, 50-60ml should do. The wine, lemon, and salt were fine additions, so keep them, but taste, taste, taste for balance.

Basque "Burnt" Cheesecake

I love cheesecake and the the burnt appearance of this impressed me; curiously, this cheesecake has no crust. If you don't feel like spending the 20 minutes and $17 to make this, you can order chef José Andrés version for only $109! :-)

I compared recipes from four sources, ignored the outliers, and took ideas from each; the ingredients and execution were quite similar. The Guardian provided terrific detail but used a smaller springform pan than mine, while Cooking Issues seemed too hot (the comments said as much). Bon Appetit and Tasting Table were nearly identical. I like the idea of the tartness of The Guardian's creme fraiche so I use a mix of heavy cream and sour cream here. Below, we add a bit of Salt for American cream cheese since the Basque version is a little saltier; the Flour or Cornstarch prevents weeping.

The original quantities are for a 10-inch / 25-cm diameter 6-cm high springform pan. For just the two of us, I got a 16x4-cm pan and scaled the recipe to 40%, but it's shorter (27% capacity, not 40%) so this recipe does NOT fit (a 20x4-cm  or 18x5-cm pan should accommodate this).

10in/25cm pan   16cm

-------------  -----   

2   Lb  900 g  360 g  Philadelphia Cream Cheese, room temperature

1.5 C   330 g  132 g  Sugar

5         5      2    Eggs

1   C   235 g   94 g  Heavy Cream

1   C   240 g   96 g  Sour Cream or Creme Fraiche

1   tsp   3 g  1.2 g  Kosher Salt (for American Cheese)

2   Tbs  15 g    6 g  All Purpose Flour (or Corn Starch)

Grease the springform pan with butter, and line it with parchment, with extra height about an inch above the sides. You can make strip around the outside and a separate disk for the bottom, or you can just press in a large sheet and smooth out the edges: the rough and rustic edge is a trademark of this cake, and  after trying to fit the sides and bottom separately, I can see why most preparations just layer perpendicular sheets!

Trying to fit separate bottom and side strips was a pain

Combine Cream Cheese and Sugar in a stand mixer, and mix slowly until smooth and sugar is dissolved, scraping down as needed, about 4 minutes.

While mixer is running, add Eggs one at a time until each is thoroughly incorporated.

Add the Heavy Cream, Sour Cream, Salt and Flour, and mix until smooth, another minute.

Pour into prepared springform pan, and chill about 30 minutes so that the center heat will be delayed (this may not be necessary).

Preheat oven to 400F / 200C, then put cake pan on a cookie sheet (to catch drips) and bake for about 50 minutes, less for the smaller pan. The top should look quite brown, even though the center will remain jiggly. If not, leave it in another 10 minutes and check; repeat as needed. The temperature of the center should be 140F / 60C. My total time was 70 minutes, and my probe always measured near boiling, even though the cake was quite jiggly, not sure what I'm missing.

Remove from the oven and let cool, it should "gel". 

Remove from the springform pan and take off the parchment.

Serve warm or cool.

Stuffed Squid in its own Ink

This is dramatically black, surprisingly rich, and not that difficult to make. Serve it over cooked white rice for good contrast.

Squid with ink sauce served over rice

The recipe is adapted from "¡Delicioso! The Regional Cooking of Spain" by Penelope Casas, "Cipirones Rellenos en su Tinta". I've streamlined it to avoid removing the squid from the sauce and overlap cooking and prep times. The squid we get, by Town Dock, frozen and available at BJs Wholesale, does not need the 2+ hours cooking time hers do; this should take about an hour total.  Makes two servings.

Stuffing

1 pound Squid, about 2-4 inches long, cleaned, defrosted; separate tentacles and tubes

1 Tbs Olive Oil

1 medium Onion, chopped very fine

2 cloves Garlic, minced

1.5 Tbs Parsley, minced

Salt

Pepper

I used a 3 Quart Pot, about 6-inches tall, but narrow enough that the sauce mostly cover the Stuffed Squid when it cooked later.

Finely chop the Squid tentacles and fins, saute in Olive Oil with Onion, Garlic, Parsley, Salt, and Pepper. 

Cook about 10 minutes.

Move it to a bowl and reuse the pot for the Sauce.

Sauce

1 tsp Squid Ink

1/8 C Dry Red Wine

1/8 C Fish stock, clam juice, liquid from defrosting the Squid, or Water

1 Tbs Olive Oil

1 medium Onion, chopped fine

2 clove Garlic, minced

4 ounces Bell Pepper, cored, seeded, finely chopped (we used an orange one)

4 ounces Tomato

Pepper, black

In a bowl, combine Ink, Wine, Fish Stock and set aside to dissolve a bit; the Ink is quite thick and wants to stick to itself and everything else.

Heat the Oil and saute Onions, Garlic, Peppers, Tomatoes, Parsley, Black Pepper for 5 minutes. Cover and cook slow for 15 minutes to break down the vegetables. 

Stir in the Ink/Wine mixture and any liquid from the defrosted Squid.

While the sauce cooks, stuff the squid.

Stuff the Squid

Load a wide-tipped pastry bag with the cooked stuffing; you can use a spoon but it's fidgety.

Stuff each of the Squid tubes, but don't over fill. 

Close each with toothpicks.

Combine, Cook

Whiz the Sauce with an immersion blender and pass through a fine sieve to strain out tomato skins, seeds, and leave a smooth sauce. Return to pan.

Add Stuffed Squid to the Sauce and cook until the squid is tender enough, ours took about 20 minutes.

If the sauce is thin, leave it uncovered or slightly covered; if thick, put a lid on it.

It should be like a thick gravy, not a loose liquid.

Taste the sauce and add Salt if needed, but be careful since the Ink is pretty salty.

While this is cooking, cook some Rice.

Serve

Add cooked Rice to warmed plates.

Remove the Squids one at a time, and remove the toothpicks; arrange squids on the rice.

Cover with the cooked Sauce.

Garnish with some minced Parsley for contrast.

Gâteau Basque #1

This was a terrible recipe, but a tasty result. The technique was fussy and involved a piping bag to place the pastry bottom and top -- that's actually what attracted me. In the middle is an orange aromatic pastry cream, it's really quite luxurious. It's funny to me there is an entire festival about this dish, so it seemed important to try it.

I'm re-writing the recipe to use metric consistently, and order the ingredients the way you need to use them. For my 8-inch tart pan, I needed a little more Cake mix to cover, but it baked up adequately. There appear to be two variations, one with pastry cream, the other with Black Cherries, but here I used the cream and sour cherries which worked nicely. But really, next time, I'll use a more traditional and proper-bakers' recipe: the pastry is rolled normally and the cream is piped in, not the other way around!

Pastry Cream
300 ml     Milk, whole
  1        Orange, Zest
  1 whole  Egg
  1        Egg Yolk
240 g      Flour, all purpose
 15 g      Corn Starch
 60 g      Sugar
  5 ml     Vanilla extract

  ? ??     Sour Cherries

Cake
240 g      Flour, all purpose
  1 tsp    Baking Powder
160 g      Butter
160 g      Sugar
  2 whole  Eggs

Glaze
 1         Egg Yolk
 60 ml     Milk

Simmer Milk and Orange Zest to flavor the Milk.
In separate bowl, mix Egg, Egg Yolk, Flour, Corn Starch, Sugar and Vanilla to form a paste.
Add hot Milk mixture to mixing bowl, quickly stir to combine but not cook the eggs.
Return to saucepan, whisk over medium heat until it thickens to a pastry cream or custard texture, with out curdling the eggs.
Strain through fine sieve, cover, and chill in fridge.

Butter and dust with flour an 18 cm / 7 inch cake tin; I used an 8-inch tart pan which was just a bit too large diameter, but it worked.
Mix Flour and Baking Powder in a bowl.
In a large bowl or stand mixer, beat Butter with Sugar until smooth and creamy.
Beat in Eggs, one at a time.
Gradually add the Flour and Baking Powder and continue mixing; this is too dense for a cheap hand mixer.
Transfer into a piping bag, and pipe a spiral onto the bottom off the pie tin.
Pipe a line up the side to create an edge.

Fill the center with the cooled Pastry Cream and smooth.

Add the Sour Cherries.
Pipe the top using the same spiral technique; I didn't have quite enough to cover.
Chill while you preheat the oven to 180C / 350F.
Whisk the Egg Yolk and Milk and paint the Glaze on the top of the pie;
use the tines of a fork to carve a slight diagonal stripe pattern in the top.
Bake 45 minutes until dark golden; it will rise quite a bit.
Cool.

Mahi Mahi Pil Pil #2 sous vide: lower temperature, less oil

We discovered that Mahi Mahi releases the emulsifier (like Bacalao) that builds the creamy Pil Pil sauce. This time, we'll try lower fish-friendly temperature and less oil, since the sauces expands like a mayonnaise. We're using sous vide again to control the temperature and minimize oil; this turned out very well.

Mahi Mahi with Pil Pil sauce, served with asparagus and patatas bravas

Our previous work with Bacalao and Mahi Mahi used temperatures from 90C/194F down to 65C/150F, and this time we'll go to 60C/140F.  We got a vacuum packed pair of filets, skin on; we believe the emulsifier is under the skin, but cannot prove it. We freeze a bit of oil, and vacuum bag it with the fish, traditional garlic and chili. It doesn't take long, about 30 minutes.

312 g       Mahi Mahi, as 2 skin-on filets
100 ml      Olive Oil
  4 cloves  Garlic
  2 whole   Chili
            Salt

Put 50 ml of Oil into 2 bowls and freeze hard so it doesn't get sucked out when vacuuming the bag.
Chill the filets of fish in the freezer so they won't lose water when vacuuming, or leave frozen if they came that way.
Use two vacuum bags, and place a filet in each, with a frozen Oil puck, 2 cloves Garlic, 1 Chili each; seal.

Cook the bags in a sous vide bath heated to 60C/140F for 30 minutes.
Strain off the oil into a tall narrow container like a skinny glass: you hopefully should have some white proteins, the precious emulsifier; let it settle out and slurp the protein into a small bowl or glass with a turkey baster.

Note the protein, the emulsifier, settling to the bottom

Building the emulsion

Leave the fish in the bags, hanging in the water to keep warm for service.
In a warm skillet, whisk the protein to whip in air; after a while -- about 5 minutes -- it should start foaming.
Drizzle in some of the fishy oil, a little at a time, and whip until you form an emulsion.

The sauce has incorporated most the oil and come together beautifully

Continue adding oil and building the sauce; if it starts to thicken, whisk in some warm water; season with salt as you whisk. We used all the oil from the bags and it made a proper amount.
Plate the fish, top with the sauce, add the garlic and chili as a garnish.

Results, Next Time

The texture of the fish came out well at this low temperature, but the thicker piece could have used a little more time under the skin. 

The skin on this fish was a distraction, it was soggy but a bit chewy; next time, remove the skin while the fish is raw but put it in the sous vide bag because we believe that's where most of the emulsifier is. (I think it would be more difficult to remove the skin after cooking, as the fish is fragile, and it would cool down.)

This was a perfect amount of Pil Pil sauce, so the reduced oil was the right proportion.

Consider adding some lemon juice to the Pil Pil in addition to the water too give it some zing; maybe this violates some Basque law...

Sous Vide Cod Pil Pil

We may have discovered something new: you can make Pil Pil with plain cod, not just dried bacalao.

Previously, we'd used sous vide to minimize the oil and effort required for Pil Pil, the magical hollandaise-like emulsion. Every Pil Pil we've seen (and eaten) uses dried salted bacalao, preserved cod. We speculated that the mysterious emulsifying agent was within the fish skin, and that we might be able to develop the emulsion with fresh cod. Finding cod with skin on proved difficult but we found skin-on cod steaks at our local Korean supermarket.   We cooked it as before, with oil and some garlic in a sous vide bag, dropping the temperature to 65C/150F from the 78C/172F we used earlier.

Cod Pil Pil with truffled sunchoke risotto

Sure enough, the sous vide bag had some of the white emulsifying liquid in it, and this time the fish was beautifully moist and flaking apart in large chunks.  As before, we separated the liquid from the oil, whipped it with a mesh strainer until it started thickening, and drizzled in some of the oil from the sous vide bag until we developed a sauce. We added a bit of lemon to thin and brighten it, and adjusted with salt, and served it with the cod.  Really quite excellent.

429 g     Cod steak, fresh, with skin, portioned
250 ml    Extra Virgin Olive Oil
  4 clove Garlic, slightly crushed
  1       Chili Arbol
  1 pinch Salt

It can help to chill the oil before trying to vacuum seal the bag, but since we don't really care about the "under vacuum" part of "sous vide" as we're essentially low-temperature poaching, you can just seal carefully.

Cod, oil, garlic, chili in sous vide bag

Add the ingredients to the bag, seal, and cook sous vide at 65C/150F for 30 minutes. 
Drain the oil and precious white liquid into a tall narrow container.
Let settle a bit and suck out the white liquid that settles to the bottom with a turkey baster.
Whip that in a low temperature skillet with a mesh skimmer until it starts to thicken a bit.
Drizzle in some of the oil until the emulsion builds, then add more until you have as much as you like. 
Adjust density with lemon juice and water, season with salt.  
Serve on Cod.

What we learned

Pre-cut the portions of cod since they're quite fragile after cooking.
Fresh skin-on cod works as well as preserved salted and dried bacalao.
Lowering the temperature to 65C does release the emulsifying elixir.
We can add lemon and salt without breaking the emulsion.

Next Time

Salt the cod flesh a bit before adding to the bag.
Reduce the oil to just enough required for our portion of emulsified sauce, so we have none left over, maybe 50ml (3 Tbs).
Try dropping the temperature even further, to 57C/135F so it doesn't quite fall apart; hopefully, we'll still get the white emulsifying liquid.

Suspicions

Perhaps it's not the cod, or the cod skin that's the emulsifier; we've had success with Mahi Mahi. Is it possible the emulsifier is in fact the garlic cloves in the sous vide bag? We know garlic is a weak emulsifier from our delicious egg-free Toum.  Try without garlic some time.

Sous Vide Bacalao Pil Pil

Cooking the Bacalao sous vide allows us to use much less oil than our previous modernist approach, while perfectly cooking the fish and capturing the essential gelatin that gives us the Pil Pil emulsion.

Bacalao with Pil Pil sauce, Catalan style greens, Pa amb tomàquet

Previously, we'd used the science-based technique we learned from Basque chefs: they completely submerged the Bacalo in enough oil to cover and gently cooked to release the gelatin required for this sauce. This is much less work and much more reliable than the traditional method of sliding the fish back and forth in a pan with a little oil to release the gelatin, but it left us with a huge amount of fishy oil that we had to find a use for.

This time, we reasoned that we could use much less oil if we cooked the fish in a sous vide bag, and it would be trivial to capture the released gelatin.  It would also allow us to cook the fish very gently in a controlled manner.

We had gotten a big frozen chunk of skin-on, bone-in Bacalo from a Portuguese market. We believe it was salted like traditional Bacalao but it had been rehydrated to desalinate before freezing.

370 g     Bacalao (rehydrated to desalinate)
4   clove Garlic
1         Chili Arbol, seeded
250 ml    Olive Oil, good quality
1   pinch Salt

Seal Bacalao, Garlic, Chili, and Olive oil in sous vide bag.

Cook sous vide at 78C/172F for 30 minutes. When you remove the bag from the bath, you should see the white liquid gelatin below the fish and oil.

White gelatin elixir below Bacalao, oil

Pour off the liquid into a tall narrow container and allow to separate. Use a turkey baster to extract the gelatin from the bottom to another tall narrow glass. Repeat separation until you've got one container of oil and one of gelatin; it's all right if it's not perfect.

First settling

Second separation, mostly gelatin; oil is in the bowl on the right

To make the Pil Pil sauce, add 10-15 ml (2-3 tsp) of the white gelatin liquid to a pan and turn on very low heat.  Whip to incorporate air; I used a mesh scum skimmer which worked very well, but a fork or whisk should also do.  When frothy with fine bubbles, drizzle in a few drops of the oil. Continue whipping until a stable emulsion forms. Add more oil, a little at a time, and incorporate until you have the volume you need. If the emulsion starts to break or if it becomes too thick for your taste, add a splash of hot water and whip to incorporate. I took the pan off the heat and did most of this on the counter, as it seemed even the low heat was encouraging the sauce to break. Adjust taste with salt.

Whisk oil into gelatin with mesh skimmer to form emulsion

Plate cooked fish, and top with Pil Pil sauce.  We served ours with mustard greens cooked Catalan style with sultanas, toasted pine nuts and garlic; and Pa amb Tomàquet (toasted bread rubbed with garlic and topped with -- in our case -- tomato pulp instead of being rubbed with fresh tomato).

Save the rest of the precious gelatin; we froze ours.

What Worked, What Didn't

Everything worked beautifully with this technique: we got a bunch of precious fish elixir to use and to save for a future batch; we didn't end up with liters of excess fish oil; the fish was nicely cooked, and the Pil Pil sauce had a good texture.

Now that we've figured this out, a simple search shows us we are not the first to do it this way; duh.

Next Time

How low can we drop the heat and still extract the gelatin elixir? 78C seems a bit high to cook fish, can we drop it to 55C/131F where the gelatin is supposed to first start releasing? Does Bacalao need the higher temperature? Would other fresh (unsalted/rehydrated) fish be better at lower temperatures? One recipe we found recipe uses 65C/150F for 30 minutes.

Try traditional dry salted Bacalao; we have noticed that none of the boneless pieces had skin on, and the skin may be where all the gelatin lives.

Since we use so little oil and there not much effort, we can try other fish species; we've already ascertained Mahi Mahi works (and Sea Trout did not). What others will release gelatin for an emulsion?

Other Work

In 2022 we recreated this in our Barcelona apartment, at 55C for 30 minutes but pointed out 45-60 might be better. 

While looking for other sous vide bacalao recipes, I found two videos which provide more ideas. 

This first, which was done in 2015 and therefore predates mine, cooked at 65C for 30 minutes, and used the same strainer-in-skillet technique I did to create an emulsion from the "fish water", what I called "elixer. 

The next, from 2021, streamlines it even further: she cooks the fish sous vide at 60C for 20 minutes, but without adding any oil. She then drains off the fish liquid elixir into a cup, no oil separation required, and creates the emulsion with a stick blender, adding in the garlic-oil to build the sauce -- brilliant. She adds a bit of honey to each bag.

This one from 2020 is nearly identical, but he cooks at 48C for 20-30 minutes before emulsifying the fish liquid with a stick blender, then adding oil. He cooks the garlic in oil in a jar in the same bath as the fish, so he doesn't even need a sauté pan. He adds some membrillo to each bag. 

Mahi Mahi al Pil Pil

I think we may have broken new ground here: the classic Basque Pil Pil sauce is always made with bacalao -- salt cod. We repeated the modern poaching-in-olive-oil technique that we used recently, but this time for mahi mahi. It rendered a lower quantity of the gelatin required to make this wonderful emulsified sauce than bacalao, but it was plenty to sauce the fish: like bacalao, the fish -- along with good olive oil -- produced its own hollandaise/mayonnaise-like sauce, super rich. In tonight's experiment, we also tried a sea trout because it had a thick subcutaneous layer of fat, but it didn't render the gelatin like bacalao does, so it could not make its own sauce.

Mahi Mahi and Sea Trout with Pil Pil sauce, shishito peppers, potatoes

We reasoned that a cold-water fish with a layer of fat would work like cod, from which bacalao is made, so we got sea trout (150g); it looks very much like salmon.  We also wanted to try a warm-water fish like we find when we visit Florida, so we got mahi mahi (270g). The quantities don't really matter here, the technique does.

We put each fish in its own small pan, skin side up (the skin sticks if it's touching the bottom), and covered with tasty extra virgin oil; we added a couple cloves of garlic to each. Heat up each to poach the fish, and hopefully release some precious gelatin which will act as an emulsifier.  Keep the oil well below boiling of water so you don't evaporate off any rendered gelatin. The trout released no gelatin, but the mahi mahi seemed to release a little.  The oil was about 90C/194F.

We pulled the trout out after about 15 minutes, but the mahi mahi is a more dense fish so we left it for about 30 minutes. Our theory is that the gelatin comes from just under the skin, so we pulled off the skin and added it back to the hot oil to cook another 10 minutes. We strained the oil into a measuring cup and let it settle, and after another 10 minutes or so were delighted to see oil on top and something that looked like heavier, water-based gelatin on the bottom. I separated most of the oil off and poured the gelatin portion into a tall narrow glass to separate further.

Oil on the top, gelatin on the bottom

I slurped the bottom layer of what we optimistically assumed was gelatin with a turkey baster and transferred it into a cool skillet. I then whipped this a few minutes with a fine mesh strainer to beat air into it and was very happy to see a foam form, the precursor to an emulsion. I added some of the now-cooled oil little by little to establish the emulsified sauce.

Whipping the gelatin until a white foam is established

It seemed more thin than the bacalao-based emulsion but I kept adding oil and it built up nicely. I had the heat on as low as it can go on my cooktop, but I'm not sure I needed any heat at all -- I think too much heat would cause the sauce to break.

Add the fishy oil little by little at first, more aggressively when the sauce is established

Once well-established I could add more oil with impunity. This 19 second video should show the sauce coming together.

The sauce was rich with olive oil flavor, a fine quality oil pays off here since it's really the only ingredient.   It wasn't seasoned with anything, so when we plated, we added some salt and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

What did we learn?

I've not seen recipes for pil pil using anything than bacalao. There are "shrimp pil pil" or "gambas al pil pil" but these are really shrimp in oil with garlic and hot chili pepper: "gambas al ajillo" and not an emulsified sauce at all.

Bacalao isn't the only fish from which gelatin can be extracted to use as an emulsifier for pil pil sauce. but not all fish will release gelatin. We have no idea which will and which won't, but mahi mahi definitely will. 

Next Steps

We'd like to repeat the experiment with the easier-to-find dried bacalao, the kind that's as hard as a sheet of plywood, and encrusted in salt. This is the classic form, and has to be hydrated with fresh water for a couple days. It has skin, and usually has bones which we're hope will be easy to remove once poached.  This is the baseline that all other work should really start from, and we're quite certain that will work fine.

Can we cook the bacalao with a minimum amount of olive oil using a sous vide technique? Use only the amount of oil you'd need for the sauce, maybe 200 ml, not the pots full we need for poaching. Freeze the olive oil solid (so it doesn't squirt out) and place in a vacuum bag with the hydrated bacalao and a couple cloves of garlic. Cook at the same 90C/195F for 30 minutes or so and check for rendered gelatin.

If sous vide works, can we use a lower, fish-friendly temperature, e.g., 50C/125F instead of the 90C/195F we used today?  We could hold the fish almost indefinitely without fear of over cooking, as long as we need to render gelatin.

Can we get gelatin from skinless, boneless bacalao that's now showing up in regular gringo grocery stores? This would make it much more accessible.

Can we season the sauce as we're building the emulsion? Salt seems easy, since salt cod's full of it. Can we add some lemon juice or white wine, or would those denature the gelatin and ruin the sauce?

Is the garlic important? In old school Catalan and Provençal aioli, garlic is the emulsifier. It's a very difficult sauce to make as it's a weak emulsifier and it breaks in the blink of an eye. Once we've established above what works with garlic, does the quality suffer without the garlic?