Welcome back to How I Cook+,
It’s the penultimate issue of BEER SNACKS…
It’s a bit of a seafood feast this week, with each recipe sporting an aquatic ingredient. The gildas are super easy to make without octopus, and are still absolutely delicious. The other two, well they’re sort of defined by their fishy ingredient. Get down and support your local fishmonger!
We’ve got music from my new favourite band and a cookbook from one of the greats.
Happy cooking,
B x
FISH KEBAB
I think these are really cool little take on kebab, some of the comments on my instagram would beg to differ. These are inspired by Israeli fish kebab, often served with fresh bread, tahini sauce, herbed grains and a sauce (chraime or hot sauce). They’re absolutely delicious and when fried in olive oil, a really delicious little beer snack. My version aren’t strictly traditional, I was using bits I had in the fridge and a few of my own little additions. The thai basil works so well in the mix, a little hit of aniseed is just what the kebab doctor ordered.
This is a really simple recipe, you basically just bung everything into a food processor and whizz it up. The trick is to get the texture just right. The more you blend the fish, the more it you unlock the proteins held in the fillet, making the mix stickier. If you overblend, the mix becomes too tacky and a bit texturally dull. I like to have a few larger pieces of fish in the mix to give some contrast. If things are a little wet, add some more breadcrumbs.
I served these with a really simple combo of warm bread, garlic yoghurt and my go to chopped salad. Enough said.
OCTOPUS GILDA
There ain’t much to this one… It’s a pile of all my favourite Spanish bits and bobs. When I think of “Beer Snacks” my mind instantly boards a plane to Spain. Every time.
For me, nobody does it better. Plates of thinly sliced jamon, piles of oily, golden crisps with pickled chillies and of course the mighty gilda. Probably the most famous of the pintxos or tapas from the Basque region of spain. This little skewer of salty, savoury bits and bobs was named after a racy film noir named Gilda, that managed to sneak past the censorship laws of Franco-era Spain. The locals celebrated the movie by creating a little drinking snack and naming it after the femme fatale played by Rita Hayworth. If you go out to the pintxos bars in the Basque country, you’ll see heaps of posters of Hayworth pasted onto the walls. It’s a cool story, and a delicious beer snack.
I popped octopus onto the ends of my gilda, but you don’t have to! The classic is just the olive, guindilla and anchovy.
CRISPY PRAWNS
This might be one of my favourites from the series. It’s a real home run. It looks really fancy to me, but some have said they look like the crispy prawns you can buy at iceland for £3.50. Screw that, these are way better.
When you cook prawns, the tails naturally curl up, which is not conducive to clean-fingered dipping. If you try and dip a curled up prawn into garlic yoghurt, your fingers are getting dipped too. Cocktail sticks are a great little trick that’ll keep your prawn tail nice and straight. As the prawn cooks, the tail will try and curl up, but the cocktail stick will say no. Just remember to remove it before you tuck in. Not only do they look better, they’re easier to eat. Win, win.
Prawn oil! What is it? What can you do with it? This is a great way to use the whole prawn. So much pure, intense shellfish-y flavour is held within the shells and heads of prawns and it’s a tragedy to throw them out. The best way to use them is to infuse them in liquid. Stock, tomato sauce, oil, butter, water - anything goes. Today I’ve used a lovely olive oil along with plenty of other gorgeous aromats to make an oil perfect for finishing our dipping sauce. I had plenty left over and tossed some through a bowl of pomodoro a few days later. Delicious. You’ll likely have some leftover, too, and it’ll keep in your fridge for a few days in a sealed container.
FISH KEBAB