2011 Cooking Club Week 42: Kroketten

Newaglish

Kroketten/Krokets (meat croquettes to you and I) are a very popular Dutch snack food. As someone with a Dutch mother, I’ve had plenty of occasions to be over in the Netherlands and whenever I’m there I gorge on them. In supermarkets you find them pre-made and sold frozen in bags and you take them home and deep-fry them. Whenever anyone in the family is in the Netherlands, we are always obligated to bring back a few bags of these Krokets in our suitcase for immediate consumption upon arrival in Ireland.

More commonly than the supermarket variety however, people buy them as take-away snacks from the “hole-in-the-wall” FEBO shops. These shops have lots of little windows where you put in your one or two euro, open the window and take out whatever hot or cold snack you like.

I know some of you are thinking “hey, we already have croquettes here in Ireland!”. These are not the same thing. What you get in the UK and Ireland is a potato croquette, which is a generally flavourless potato thing which pales in comparison to the meaty, savoury deliciousness of a Kroket.

A Kroket consists of a meat ragout which is shaped into a sausage and then breadcrumbed and deep-fried. The meat used will typically be chicken or beef – the homemade ones we make are usually made from leftover roast chicken, as we’re not huge roast beef people. I do think though that the authentic FEBO Kroketten are usually made with beef so I use beef in this recipe. You can also make a vegetarian Kroket with a good melting cheese (I made them with smoked gouda before if I remember correctly) and some extra herbs.

(As a shortcut to roasting an entire joint of meat for this, you can use fried chicken fillets or minced beef but make sure there isn’t too much moisture in them although I would recommend to stick to the recipe)

This recipe is a combination of my mother’s approach, internet recipes and trial-and-error. It’s a little bit time-consuming but it’s reasonably fool-proof and well worth the effort.

Kroket Recipe
Makes 24

Equipment
Deep-fryer
Food processor
Other usual kitchen things (I’m assuming you all have a saucepan, for example!)

Ingredients
50g butter
250ml hot milk
50g plain flour
300g leftover cold roast beef (or chicken), finely chopped, minced or whizzed in a food processor
1/2 an onion, finely diced
1 tbsp ketjap manis (available in Asian food stores) - This is a sort of sweet soy sauce – there is a large influence of Indonesian cuisine in Dutch cooking (look up rijsttafel) and this is one of those influences
1 tbsp chopped thyme leaves
1 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Crumb Coating
2 eggs, lightly beaten
80ml milk
250g plain flour
500g breadcrumbs (I use Paxo Golden Breadcrumbs as they’re neater and don’t fall apart as much as actual breadcrumbs from the likes of Mr. Crumb)
Pinch of salt
Vegetable oil for deep-frying

Serve with
Traditionally mustard, but you can have these on their own or with anything else – I usually serve these as a starter and you can combine them with most kinds of salad or combinations of savoury sauces


Method
Melt the butter in a small, heavy-based saucepan. Stir in the flour to make a paste (roux), and cook, stirring all the time, for about 3 minutes. Gradually mix in the hot milk to make a béchamel sauce.
Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes to get rid of the floury taste. Add a pinch of salt to season then tip the béchamel into a large mixing bowl and leave to cool.

Place the remaining ingredients into a food processor and whiz until smooth.

Tip the contents of the food processor into the mixing bowl with the cool béchamel sauce and stir it in well to form a thick paste. Taste and adjust seasoning to your liking – I will often add some additional nutmeg here to make sure I get the right flavour. Cover with cling film and pop it in the fridge for a few hours until it’s chilled.

Take the Kroket mixture from the fridge and form it into chunky little logs (3 x 10 cm) - you should get about 24 in total.

Whisk the egg and milk together and set up a little production line of 3 dishes containing the flour, the egg mixture and the breadcrumbs. Anyone who’s breadcrumbed anything before should recognise the process here.

Roll the Krokets in the flour first, then dip them into the egg mixture and then the breadcrumbs so they are evenly coated. For an extra-crunchy coating dip the Krokets into the egg and breadcrumbs for a second time then refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Heat the oil in a deep-fryer or a heavy-based frying pan to 180C. Preheat the oven to 100C. Fry the Krokets in batches until golden brown all over, about 5 minutes. Drain briefly on a wire rack and transfer to the oven to keep warm while you fry the remaining Krokets. It’s really important to complete the draining process as these will be a little oily coming out of the deep-fryer but most importantly they will be HOT!

I didn’t actually get a chance to re-make these and take pictures before the weekend but if I get a chance this week I definitely will. Below is a photo from the FEBO website which should give you an idea of what you’re aiming for!

Faith

Sounds amazing!!

The Hill Billy

Yum!

sponge_bob

deffinetly going to try and make this

unkel

Kroket and haring are the only things I really miss so much that I must have them everytime I go home

Will try this recipe soon! :cool:

Little Alex

Met frieten en bier. :pac:

They were lovely and good fun to make!

Newaglish

Little Alex wrote: »

Met frieten en bier. :pac:

They were lovely and good fun to make!

They look really good, well done! So glad somebody actually made them :pac:

Susie_Q

Would these still work if you shallow fried them or even oven baked them?

Newaglish

Susie_Q wrote: »

Would these still work if you shallow fried them or even oven baked them?

I can't say I've ever seen them done outside of a deep fryer but I think oven baking might work if you had the temperature up high enough for about 20 minutes (complete guess) - everything is cooked already when it's put together so you're really just browning the outside and heating the middle through. They might be a little delicate out of the oven, that would be my only concern.

Little Alex

Susie_Q wrote: »

Would these still work if you shallow fried them or even oven baked them?

My guess would be no, Susie.

When you chill the filling it turns into a kind of "jelly" because there's so much starch in it. I think if you were to bake them that the filling would melt and run before the breadcumbs "set". I think they might well collpase or even fully break open.

You can see in my pic that the filling melted and settled, but frying meant that the egg and breadcrumbs were instantly set in a cylindrical shape.

Newaglish

I've checked with the ultimate authority (my mother) and she said No - the only thing you can do is add more oil to the pot and deep-fry them but I understand that can be a pain.

unkel

As you can see, I'm not the best manufacturer of log rolls but they were damn' tasty - exactly the same as you'd get them in Holland. Never knew it was the nutmeg that gave it such a distinct taste. Used some left over roast beef and couldn't wait for the mixture to set for hours in the fridge so had it in the freezer for about 15 minutes. Not the easiest to handle but was still ok. Just used left over brown bread for the breadcrumbs.



Breakfast, lunch & dinner at 3PM on Stephen's day :cool:

Thanks, Newaglish for sharing!

Faith

I FINALLY got around to making these tonight! I've had the ketjap manis for about a year and have never gotten around to making them.

I made them with leftover roast chicken. They were really tasty! They didn't look great, but they tasted lovely. Here they are with chipper chips (including the slightly burnt bits where the filling spilled out a little ):

Roald Dahl

I love these!

It's a long time since I was in Amsterdam and buying one of these from a FEBO along Leidsestraat!



They really are tasty and worth the effort.

I made mine with Quorn mince. I also made some of them into bitterballen shape. I think they're similar to kroketten.