Do You Make Bacalau at Home?

[Moses Botbol]

How often do you make bacalau at home? How much do you pay for loin's per pound in your locale? A local supermarket has its own bacalau fridge with a kilo of loins for $15 USD. Hard to say no at that price!

[Eric Menchen]

So are you asking if we take fresh cod and salt and dry it to make bacalau, or use already dried/salted bacalau and then prepare it in some way? The latter I've done, but the bacalau was very expensive here in Colorado, so I think I've only done it once. Your question sounds more like the former, which also doesn't make a lot of sense for me here in Colorado, but would if you live somewhere where you can get fresh cod.

[Moses Botbol]

So are you asking if we take fresh cod and salt and dry it to make bacalau, or use already dried/salted bacalau and then prepare it in some way? The latter I've done, but the bacalau was very expensive here in Colorado, so I think I've only done it once. Your question sounds more like the former, which also doesn't make a lot of sense for me here in Colorado, but would if you live somewhere where you can get fresh cod.

Recipes using bacalau.

[Lucas S]

My family does all the time.

Let it soak overnight in cold water, then change the water in the morning and let soak a few more hours. Boil the fish. Also boil potatoes in accordance with how many dinner guests, peel them, slice them into .5cm disks.

Concurrently, chop 2-3 large onions, fry them in olive oil. When getting golden, add a bit of diced tomatoes, oregano, and pinch of salt

Then you take a very large pyrex dish and "assemble" the layers of fish, sliced potatoes and fried onions. In addition, you want to add thinly-sliced raw onion rings and pitted olives in the inner layers for freshness and flavor, respectively. The outer layer you add a few tomato slices like a margherita pizza and slices of 2 whole boiled eggs for decoration and extra flavor. Drizzle extra olive oil on top and salt the tomato slices.

This is how we do it and it is supremely popular with family guests.

All that said, when I went to Lisbon and ordered it, they served bacalhau very simply underneath raw (extremely strong) onion, both drenched in olive oil. I wouldn't recommend this as the onion rules the dish, but it did give me the impression that in Portugal they can keep it simple and you don't need to over-complicate things.

I also would say that you want to avoid low-grade bacalhau, but the mid-grade is just fine. Paying top dollar for the prime loins isn't really necessary as you are going to boil the hell out of it to remove the salt and fragment it into chewable bits (a la Japanese cooking philosophy) when you assemble the aforementioned recipe.

[Moses Botbol]

My family does all the time.

I make it in the same general manner. I cook the potatoes in the water that cooked the bacalau. The fish only boils for 5-10 minutes. I go for the thick boneless loins with no skin. Worth the extra $3 a lb considering I only use ~1.5 lbs. I like to add some chopped grilled linquica along with eggs on top. Why not!

My friend's mother did a variant on the recipe where she cracks an egg over the potatoes when layering. I'll have to find a recipe; she passed away. He hasn't started transcribing her volumes of recipes. She lived in the US 60 years and did not know one word of english.

She made the best desserts and was known in the Boston area Portuguese community for such.