How to Make Croquetas

pinzas = tongs
harina = flour
pan rallado = breadcrumbs
grumos = lumps (like in your oatmeal)

Word up, homies!

We had croquetas for dinner tonight, and Ana showed me how to make them.  They are these doughy little balls of fried delicious goodness, and they're very simple to make, if a little time-consuming.  The only tricky part is deciding how much milk to add—it's one of those things you have to do a few times to get a feel for it.  Additionally, Ana doesn't measure anything, so these are kind of approximations.

Ingredients: olive oil, flour, milk, salt, 1 egg, fine breadcrumbs, and whatever you want to use as filling (we used precooked tuna, but you can put any kind of meat, vegetable, fish, whatever).

You start with some heated oil in a frying pan.  Then you add about six tablespoons of flour. (Although what she called a "tablespoon" was really a tablespoon heaped two inches high with flour.  So like, as much flour as you can get to stay balanced on the tablespoon; six of those.)  You mix this up over medium heat to toast the flour.  When it gets brown and toasty, take it off the heat.

Let it cool all the way before adding the milk, or the sudden temperature change will make it seize up.  In total, she said she added roughly a liter of milk (which translates to about a quart).  Go a splash at a time, over medium heat, incorporating all (most) of the flour before moving ahead, and making sure to keep squashing the grumos.  Add salt to taste as you go.  I'd say a couple teaspoons of salt went into the batch we made.

Once you've hit just the right texture—something like a cross between pancake batter and silly putty—add the filling (tuna, in this case).  Mix it in, make sure all the milk is incorporated, and then take it off the heat.  Spread the dough into a casserole dish (or a shallow bowl, it doesn't matter, we're just going to chill it) about an inch-and-a-half thick, and leave it out to cool.  After it's reached about room temperature, cover it, pop it in the fridge, and leave it there overnight.

Cut to Day 2.

Pull out your dough.  It should be all congealed and gummy.  DELISH.

Crack an egg into a bowl and mix it up.  Pour about a cup or two of breadcrumbs into a second bowl.  Ana used two tablespoons to form the croquetas, but you can also do it with your hands.  Scoop out a chunk of dough about two or three tablespoons in volume (you can really make them whatever size you want, but they shouldn't be huge or they might not cook right).  Form the chunk into a prolate spheroid (or an oblate spheroid, if you prefer, or any roundish shape).  It can be hard to manage the dough, but make sure it's a smooth ball and that you didn't just fold the dough over on itself, or they will fall apart when you try to cook them.

Dip the rounded chunk into the eggwash, and then roll it in breadcrumbs.  You now have a raw croqueta!  Up until this point, everything can be done long in advance (how long, I don't know).  Just keep the raw croquetas in the freezer until you're ready to enjoy them.

About fifteen minutes before serving, heat up a pan of bastante olive oil (Ana's was about half an inch deep).  You're essentially going to deep-fry these puppies, so make sure there really is enough oil.  Side note: I discovered that Ana conserves the extra oil she uses to cook with—she strains it into a small watering-can-type thing and uses it again later.  She doesn't just discard it.  My dad does the same thing, only with bacon fat.

Once the oil is beginning to smoke, it's hot enough.  Using pinzas, start frying the croquetas.  You can do as many at one time as fit in the frying pan without touching each other.  Ana swirled the pan around to coat them with oil.  This scared me.  I would just turn them with the tongs a couple of times.  They take about a minute per side—maybe not even.  You want them to be an appetizing golden brown all over.

Pull them out as they get done, and drain them on a plate covered with paper towel.  ¡Ta-chan!  You made croquetas!  Now EAT them.  Yummm.

Ana says you can make sweet croquetas, too.  This is a dessert called leche frita, or "fried milk.  You make them almost exactly the same way, except that you leave out the filling, and instead of salt you add bastante sugar at the lump-squashing phase.  They are generally cut into squares rather than formed into balls, which makes that step easier, and after they've been fried, you sprinkle them with sugar and I think she said caramel.  They sound fantastic.  She said we'll make them, next time.

Somehow, it didn't occur to me to take pictures.  Hurr.  My apologies.  There are some left over; I'll photograph them tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, my Art History class is going on a field trip to a city called Cuenca.  It sounds like there's a lot of interesting architecture there, so I might have another interesting blog post sooner than you think!  Cuenca is located in the part of Spain called Castilla-la Mancha, which is the region inhabited by fictional character don Quijote himself!  We won't be going to the part with the windmills, but it's still cool that we'll be there.

I mean, it's cool that we're in Spain, period.

Later, gators.