Home › Sausages › Sweetbread Croquettes
Sweetbread Croquettes
Cut a cold blanched sweetbread in dice, add an equal amount of chopped mushrooms. Simmer a few minutes with a half cup of white sauce or stock; let the mixture cool; add 2 tablespoonfuls of seasoned bread crumbs; add a little paprika, and salt to taste. Make out into balls, roll in beaten egg and crumbs, and fry in hot fat until delicately browned; they will not require more than ten minutes to cook in the fat.
Serve with them tomatoes stuffed and baked, and potatoes cut in balls with a scoop and fried in deep, hot fat until a golden brown. The potato balls may be served as a border for the croquettes, with sprigs of parsley as a garnish.
A straightforward croquette that depends almost entirely on the binder: if the mixture is loose or warm when shaped, the balls burst in the fat. Everything else is timing.
- Sweetbreads, and how to blanch themVeal sweetbreads (thymus or pancreas) are the standard; order them ahead from a butcher. "Blanched" here means soaked in several changes of cold water until pale, then simmered 15-20 minutes in acidulated water, cooled under weight, and the membrane and fat picked away. The recipe gives no quantity; a single pair of veal sweetbreads will yield roughly a cup of dice.
- The white sauce must be thickA half cup of thin sauce will not hold diced sweetbread and mushroom together. Use a heavy bechamel made at roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to the half cup of liquid, and cook the mixture until it pulls cleanly from the side of the pan.
- Chill hard before shaping"Let the mixture cool" understates it. Spread the mixture on a plate and refrigerate at least two hours, or until firm enough to cut, before rolling into balls.
- Two crumbings, not oneFor deep fat, crumb, then egg, then crumb again, and rest the coated balls 20 minutes in the refrigerator so the shell sets. A single coating tends to split.
- Ten minutes is far too longTen minutes is an outer limit, not a target -- the recipe says they "will not require more than ten minutes," and in practice they need far less. At 375F a chilled croquette the size of a golf ball is browned and hot through in 2 to 3 minutes. A full ten minutes at frying heat would darken the crust past bitterness and dry the filling; the interior is already cooked, so you are only heating and colouring.
- Seasoned crumbs"Seasoned bread crumbs" here means dry crumbs seasoned by the cook, typically with salt and pepper, not the herbed commercial product. Note that the recipe adds paprika and salt to the mixture separately. Sweetbreads are mild, so season the mixture more assertively than seems right when cold.
- The potato ballsCut with a melon baller from raw potatoes, soaked and dried, then fried at the same temperature as the croquettes -- but fry them first and hold them in a low oven, since they take 6 to 8 minutes and would overcook the croquettes if the pan were shared.
- YieldSince the recipe gives no quantities, yield can only be estimated: on one pair of sweetbreads with an equal amount of mushrooms, roughly 8 to 10 croquettes, which with the tomatoes and potatoes would serve about four as a light main course.