A couple of attempts at making a decent fishcake/croquette have come a cropper by using leftover mashed potato. The theory is sound but in practice if you make your mash with anywhere near the amount of butter that I do then you’re doomed to end up with cakes which want to emulate a slowly moving lava flow. This is how I came to the conclusion that to make good fishcakes/croquettes one has to forsake the dairy.
What you shouldn’t underestimate tho’ is the type of spud you need. A waxy potato will end up making a dry croquake (can’t be arsed to keep writing fishcake/croquette) when not using butter. A floury type (Maris Piper, Desiree, Fianna etc) will make your little spheres of moorishness succulent and soft – even when eaten cold for breakfast.
So this is not a rigid recipe but a base one open for a multitude of adaptations containing either fish, meat and cheese. And it also gives me the excuse for doing something I’ve never attempted before – uploading a picture of the crime itself.
The basic plan is to have roughly 1 part mashed potato to 1 part filling when it comes to fish, 2 parts potato to 1 part filling when ham or cheese or whatever.
Here goes then for my Crab & Prawn (or not) Croquakes
½kg of peeled and quartered floury potatoes
2 tins of crab meat
200 grams of raw prawns (black tiger, purple goat, turquoise vole etc)
2 teaspoons of crab paste (optional)
4 cloves of garlic
Salt & pepper
2 eggs for egging
Plain flour and breadcrumbs for......
"Deep" oil
Peel your garlic cloves and bung them, with the spuds, into a saucepan. Drain the tins of crabmeat into the pan too so as not to waste any flavour (don’t forget to give each tin a good squeeze – there be a lot of cheap water in them there cans and we don’t want water in our croquettes). Fill up with tapable water, add a little salt and boil until nice and soft.
In the meantime empty your crab into a large mixing bowl. Peel your prawns, cut each one into 4 or 5 bits and throw expertly into the crab. Add the crab paste (and here is my first pic
– that’s Archie posing in the background). It’s a Thai crab paste with soya bean – if you can only get normal shrimp paste then be very careful as that can go from tasteless to overpowering in a matter of nano seconds.When the potatoes and garlic are cooked they are drained and mashed. I love my Ikea bought potato ricer which is basically a huge garlic press. If you have one of these then you can “rice” straight into the bowl of crab and prawn mix. Otherwise mash them in a separate bowl before chucking over into the crustaceans. Please never consider liquidizing or blitzing potatoes – this will release starches which will ruin everything, turning it into glue.
Mix well and season with salt & pepper. The way to form into perfect ping-pong sized balls is to keep one’s Madame Palm and her Five Beautiful Daughters moist by sporadically dipping your hand into a bowl of water so as to stop the mixture sticking. Place each ball onto a sheet of grease-proof paper.
Next one has to flour, egg and breadcrumb ones balls. Standard procedure for most of us. The oil temperature should be about 170-180 °c and fry in batches appropriate for the size of your fat receptacle until golden brown, texture like sun etc. Here, for the curious, is a picture of my balls…..
I promise to try to take better pictures in the future. But you can just about see the chunks of pink shrimp poking out. What you should have is the crisp shell, silky soft crabby potato and sweet bites of prawn. Making a homemade mayonnaise as an accompaniment would only take this beyond heaven and into the gastrosphere. Especially if you mixed salmon eggs in the mayo.....Alternative additives to the base croquakes could be flaked hot-smoked haddock, salmon or herring (I’ve made some wicked ones using home smoked garfish), ham and/or cheese. You can also put in chopped parsley, chilli or chives. Finely chopped fried mushrooms go well with cheese if you squeeze the life out of them after frying.
