This is a great dish. It seems easy and simple but every part of it must be perfectly made.
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 5€ pp)
- Salt
- 200 g already cooked chickpeas (attention: DO NOT USE canned ones)
- 300 g cod filets
- 8 cherry tomatoes
- 1 small red horn pepper
- 1/2 small yellow horn pepper
- 12 kalamata olives
- 1 red onion
- 1 bay leaf
- EV olive oil
- Tiny fresh flowers of basil or a small portion of lemon zest
- Coarse black pepper (optional)
Empedrat is one of the many great dishes of the Catalan cuisine. It often contains boiled eggs, which I avoided them as I find the dish more interesting when dominated by the vegetal aromas. As the majority of dishes, prepared without or with a minimal cooking the quality of the ingredients is crucial. So:
a) The peppers and the tomatoes must be very fresh and ripe
b) The cod must be very well desalted and free of any eventual spines
c) The chickpeas must be very tender, and, of course, not ready made.
d) The olive oil must be gentle, in order to allow cod and vegetal aromas.
e) The olives must be of excellent quality, not too sour and free of bad odour conservatives
The classic version of the dish, requires all the ingredients mixed but I preferred to keep the cod separated for visual and also for gustative reasons, as I always do, according to my culinary philosophy that every bite must be slightly different than the previous one.
First of all we must cook the chickpeas. I already have told you that tinned chickpeas are going to destroy the dish. But, are homemade frozen chickpeas acceptable?
Well, even if, for a restaurant, it is forbidden to serve frozen chickpeas, as the ice turns them dry and not pleasant, for the home cuisine it is something acceptable. Especially the workers who have no time to prepare home meals on week days, they must always have in the freezer already boiled chickpeas and beans.
I remind you that the dried chickpeas can also be cooked without soaking, but the cooking time will be too long. Soaking the chickpeas for 8 to 12 hours in mineral water reduces drastically the cooking time. If the soaking water is salty or sparkling the time needed is even inferior but the result will not be the same good.
So, we decide how to soak the chickpeas, according to our available time and we then boil them in salty (mineral or filtered) boiling water till very tender, having in mind that the water must be always very hot during cooking.
We discard the water after about 15 minutes of boiling (in order to avoid digestion problems) and we transfer the chickpeas to another pot with boiling water. If we have to add more water to the pot, it must be boiling too. Baking soda is not recommended as it turns the chickpeas unpleasant.
Meanwhile, we pit the olives and we put them in cold water to desalt them. We let them for at least one hour. We cut them in halves, lenghtways.
After all that, we cook the cod which must be, I repeat perfectly desalted. Cod filets require at least 48 hours of desalting in plenty of cold water. We must change the water, substituting it with cold, every 12 hours.
We put the cod pieces in a pot with the bay leaf and water, brought at a temperature of 80 to 85 C. We cover with the lid, we turn the heat off and we leave the cod pieces for about 6 minutes. Remember that cod can be also eaten raw, so don´t exaggerate by overcooking it.
We carefully remove the cod filets and we drain them well. We keep them aside.
We cut the peppers, the cherry tomatoes and the onion in small pieces. We add the olives, the chickpeas and at least 100 ml of olive oil and we taste it to see if everything is OK. We may have to add some salt. I suggest that you add a small portion of tiny basil flowers or of lemon zest to give to your empedrat a good acidity.
We put the vegetal parts in the plates, adding pieces of cod filet on top, some more olive oil and if we like coarse black pepper.
