Iberia · Volume 04, The Cider and Cod Coast
Bacalao al Pil-Pil
Basque Country
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- 16 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The name is onomatopoeic, the sound of oil trembling as it is rocked in a clay dish. It rose in nineteenth-century Bilbao, a major redistribution port for salt cod, likely evolving from bacalao a la provenzal, and was not written down as a recipe until the twentieth century.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus soaking.
Ingredients
- 800 g salt cod, skin on, soaked and desalted per Rung 3
- 300 ml olive oil
- 4 cloves garlic, sliced
- 1 dried guindilla or cayenne, to taste
Method
- Pat the cod dry once desalted.
- Warm the olive oil gently in a wide clay cazuela with the garlic and dried guindilla or cayenne until the garlic just colours, then remove the garlic and set aside.
- Lower the heat until the oil is barely trembling, well short of a simmer, and add the cod, skin down.
- Cook slowly, gently shaking and tilting the pan in a continuous circular motion, the gupilada, gradually incorporating the released gelatine into the oil as an emulsion forms and thickens around the fish.
- This takes patience rather than a fixed number of minutes; the emulsion is ready when it coats a spoon and holds its own shape rather than separating.
- Return the garlic, spoon the sauce back over, serve immediately from the cazuela.
Notes
No source consulted for this chapter gave a single settled cooking time, only patience and constant motion; this chapter does not invent one.
What a modern chef changes
The emulsion built with precision rather than trusted to the eye.
Rung 1
Method
- Hold the cod in a sous vide bath at a steady 60°C for the initial gentle cooking stage, removing the guesswork of judging "trembling" oil by eye, before finishing the emulsification in the cazuela by hand.
- Reserve a spoonful of the gelatinous cooking liquid before serving; if the emulsion shows any sign of splitting under the pass, a high-power blender re-emulsifies it in seconds with that reserved liquid, a rescue the tradition itself achieved only through patience.
- Finish with a single drop of aged sherry vinegar rather than none at all, a small, named departure from strict tradition that cuts the richness without masking the gelatine's own flavour.