Iberia · Volume 04, The Cider and Cod Coast

Cachopo

Name: Cachopo
Total time: 30 min
Yield: Serves 2
Cuisine: The Basque Country, Cantabria & Asturias
Ingredients: 2 large, thin veal fillets, butterflied; 4 slices jamón serrano; 100 g melting cheese, such as Idiazábal or a mild alternative; As needed flour, egg, breadcrumbs; for garnish garnish: peas, mushroom, red pepper

Asturias

Cachopo, a breaded veal cutlet stuffed with ham and melting cheese: a large golden brown breaded cutlet, sliced open to reveal melted pale cheese and pink ham oozing from the centre, the crumb crust deeply crisp and evenly browned.

Illustration

Time: 30 minutes

Researched: 16 sources cited

Per Eduardo Méndez Riestra of the Asturian Gastronomy Academy, created by the cook Olvido Álvarez at Bar Pelayo in Oviedo in the mid-1940s, adapted from cordon bleu and San Jacobo, originally filled with cheese, ham and asparagus, finished in a cazuela with peas, mushrooms and red pepper.

by Asturias

Cachopo carries the same lesson again, more sharply. According to Eduardo Méndez Riestra, president of the Asturian Gastronomy Academy, cachopo was created by the cook Olvido Álvarez at Bar Pelayo in Oviedo in the mid-1940s, consciously adapted from cordon bleu and San Jacobo, originally filled with cheese, ham and asparagus. It spread from there to coastal restaurants on the Cabo de Peñas and was popularised further by the chef Fernando Martín. Weaker accounts push the dish's origin back to the eighteenth or nineteenth century; they are considerably less well sourced than Méndez Riestra's account and this chapter does not give them equal weight. Cachopo is a 1940s restaurant invention, not a folk-ancient dish, and that in no way diminishes it. It is simply what it is.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 2. About 30 minutes.

Ingredients

2 large, thin veal fillets, butterflied
4 slices jamón serrano
100 g melting cheese, such as Idiazábal or a mild alternative
As needed flour, egg, breadcrumbs
for garnish garnish: peas, mushroom, red pepper

Method

Butterfly the large, thin veal fillets, lay jamón serrano and cheese between two, and press the edges to seal.
Coat in flour, egg, then breadcrumbs.
Fry in hot oil until golden and cooked through, 6 to 8 minutes.
Finish briefly in a cazuela with the garnish per the original Bar Pelayo version, if serving that way.

What a modern chef changes

The frying temperature controlled precisely, since this is a breaded dish that lives or dies on it.

Not tied to a single rung

Method

Hold the frying oil at a genuinely fixed 175°C using a probe thermometer, rather than judging by eye, since the thin veal cooks through quickly and an oil that has crept too hot burns the crumb before the centre is done.
Rest the fried cachopo briefly on a rack, not on paper, so trapped steam does not soften the base of the crumb.
Use a genuine Idiazábal rather than a generic melting cheese, letting Rung 4's respect for a real cave-aged or DOP product carry through even into a dish that was never traditionally built around a named cheese.

Notes

This dish's elevation is a straightforward matter of frying discipline rather than one of this chapter's chemistry-driven techniques.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists