Brazilian Fishcakes with Molho

I like to make fishcakes whenever I have leftover cooked fish, sometimes from a whole fish we’ve put on the barbecue or baked in the oven. Turn leftover fish into Brazilian fishcakes, for a whole new meal your family will love. 

This is my first time to take part in Cooked in Translation and our host for this month is the lovely Soni Sinha (which means she gets to choose the international dish we will interpret) from Soni’s Food for Thought.  She has chosen fishcakes!  But you probably guessed that from my title.  My mind went immediately to the bolinhos de bacalau or cod balls  (Doesn’t it sound better in Portguese?  Most things do.) we loved when we lived in Brazil.  Salted cod is soaked until it is tender again, then flaked and mixed with mashed potatoes and seasonings.  Little balls of this mixture are deep-fried to a golden crust.  I am not a fan of deep-frying, at least at home, so I decided to make the mixture, form it into patties and pan-fry, adding the typical Brazilian molho or sauce to finish.  Fishcakes are a wonderful use of leftover fish so, instead of salted cod, I used grilled Grouper, but you could use any flakey fish.  Gotta say, these got good reviews at home and I would make this again! 

Ingredients

For the fishcakes:

About 2 cups or 225g cooked fish, deboned

7 oz or 200g potatoes

1 small onion

1 clove garlic

2 fresh chilies

Small bunch cilantro or coriander leaves

Sea salt

Black pepper

1 egg

For the molho:

1 medium tomato

1 small green bell pepper

1 small onion

1 medium lime (or two tablespoons juice)

1/8 – 1/4 cup or 30-60ml Olive oil

Sea salt

Black pepper

Method

Using a couple of forks, pull your fish into small pieces.  This particular Grouper was a big guy and needed a knife to cut him up.  It was the weirdest thing because he was definitely not overcooked but even his skin was tough.  His flavor, though, was outstanding.

Peel and cube your potatoes and put them to boil in lightly salted water.

Finely minced your onions, fresh chilies and garlic cloves.

Rinse the cilantro and remove any thick and woody stems. Gather it up in a small ball.  Finely mince it as well, soft stems and all.

Meanwhile, your potatoes are probably cooked.  Make sure a fork goes into the cubes very easily.  Yes?  Okay, then drain out the water and mash the potatoes until very smooth.  Set aside to cool for a few minutes.  I removed mine from the hot pot after mashing so that they would cool faster.

Mix together the fish and vegetables, including the cooled potatoes, and add a light sprinkle of salt and a couple of good grinds of black pepper.   Stir well.

Add in your one egg and mix thoroughly.

Divide the mixture evenly into four patties.

Dampen your hands and use them to form patties with the mixture.  Rest them on a plate covered with cling film.  The cling film helps them not stick to the plate and also gives you a way to get under them without mashing the beautiful patty when removing to fry.

Cover the patties with cling film and chill for 30 minutes (or until you are ready to eat.)

To make the molho, cut your tomato in half and remove the seeds.  Do the same with your bell pepper.  Cut them both into small pieces.

 Peel and dice the onion.

Mix all three together and add a good sprinkle of sea salt and a generous few grinds of fresh black pepper.

Squeeze your lime into the bowl – or if your lime has a lot of seeds, into another bowl so you can remove the seeds before adding.

Drizzle in olive oil and stir, tasting occasionally to see if more is needed.   Set aside.

When you are ready to eat, drizzle a little olive oil into a non-stick pan and gently place the fish cakes in the oil.  Cook over a medium heat and put on a lid so that the insides of the patties will warm as well.

Allow to brown on the first side before trying to turn them over.

Turn a couple of times until both sides are nicely browned and the patties are heated through.

Serve topped with a couple of spoonsful of the molho.

If you want to go completely Brazilian, the full meal could include black beans, rice and farofa, which is manioc flour, toasted with butter and seasoned with garlic.   It can sometimes be found online or in Latin American shops.  Or if you are in Cairo, in my freezer.

Enjoy!

And to take the Cooked in Translation one step farther, the next day,  I made a sandwich, spreading homemade hummus and fresh habanero pepper sauce inside half of a pita bread and filling it with crumbled fishcake topped with molho, adding a little Middle Eastern flair to the spicy Brazilian fish.  Good food has no borders!  (And isn't that the point?)

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Brazilian Night

A Brazilian Night feast with all the special dishes that remind me of our home in Macaé.

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you a man.” These words, this motto, attributed to Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuit Order, implies that our foundation years are our most important. When you live somewhere long enough, especially in your formative years, the culture, food, music and spirit get in your blood and are forever part of who you are.  Our daughters were not quite two and four when we moved to Brazil. We left when they were six-and-a-half and almost nine so Brazil is that way for our family. In our blood, forevermore a part of who we are.

Tonight we enjoyed the quintessential Brazilian meal. We started with caiprinhas, then picanha (top of the rump) well-salted and grilled over an open flame, chicken hearts cooked the same way, farofa, molho, black beans (so now you know we lived in the Carioca region) and rice.

Beans and rice are staples of the Brazilian daily diet but the type of bean depends on the region you live in. Around Rio de Janeiro, where the people are called Cariocas, the bean of choice is black and food is not cooked or served with much pepper. Up north in Bahia, the African influence is more obvious and the bean of choice is light brown, like a pinto bean. There, peppers are used liberally in most dishes. Down south, closer to Argentina, the Brazilians might well have blonde hair and blue eyes because they are descended from Germans and Italians, and they also favor brown beans but not spicy like the Bahians. 

The molho, which means sauce, is by far the simplest dish. Three major ingredients: tomato, bell pepper (green capsicum) and red or purple onion, all finely chopped. It also has a simple dressing of olive oil, freshly squeezed lime juice, sea salt and black pepper. 

The black beans are traditionally made in a pressure cooker, which keeps the beans relatively whole.  They are seasoned with sea salt, pepper, garlic and a variety of smoked pork parts. Tonight I used bacon and sausage.

Chicken hearts should be cleaned of the membrane and most of the fatty top should be cut off. Leave a little fat as it makes the barbecue flames rise up which gives the hearts a lovely crispy exterior. Marinate these in some sea salt, white vinegar (or lime juice) and olive oil. Grilled over the open flame of a barbecue, there is no morsel more succulent. 

Farofa is toasted manioc flour. This is hard to come by in the rest of the world and my last couple of bags (kept fresh in a Ziploc bag in the freezer) come from a little Brazilian specialty store on the west side of Houston, Texas.  Farofa is an acquired taste, a little like bacon flavored sawdust. Although the bag says Farofa Pronta, which means Ready, I fry a little bacon and add garlic to the pan before tossing the farofa around in the mixture. Traditional Brazilians would add butter as well but I could already feel my arteries hardening in anticipation of the meat. Very tasty sawdust indeed!  

The showstopper of the meal is the picanha, top of the rump with a healthy (or probably unhealthy, I suppose) layer of fat.  This should be liberally coated with coarse salt an few hours ahead of time, and then roasted over an open fire until just pink inside. (Knock the salt off as you cook it.) Once again, this is a hard cut to find outside of Brazil, but if you know a good butcher in your town, he or she should be able to provide you with the piece you need.  Some butchers are unwilling to cut the top of the rump off and then you have to buy the whole rump, but make some stew or a curry with the rest of it. It’s all good. 

 When this happens, put the lid on quickly!

 Beautifully done.All thanks to our experienced grill chef!

And last but not least was the first thing we enjoyed. Caiprinhas! Each glass has the juice of one whole lime so you know it’s healthy. Certainly you will not be in danger of scurvy. Cut the lime into quarters and use your same sharp knife to remove all the seeds you can. Put the lime into a short glass, adding two good tablespoons of sugar. 

Smash the limes with a muddler – if you are fortunate you have a lovely parrot one like mine : ) – 

and fill the glass with crushed ice. Now fill up the glass with cachaça and give it a quick stir. Ideally you would have short straws to put in these glasses. Sadly, I did not. 

I know I have not given explicit ingredients or instructions today. Blame the caipirinhas. You really want to know how? I've written it out here for you: Make caipirinhas! 

 The whole meal!

Enjoy!