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-I'm Katie Button.
I'm the chef
and owner of Cúrate,
a Spanish tapas bar,
and Button & Co. Bagels in
Asheville, North Carolina.
And, today,
I will be showing you
how to make croquetas de pollo,
which are
creamy chicken fritters.
The first step we're gonna do
is mince the onion
and cook it in the butter.
In Spain,
croquetas are an amazing way
to prepare leftovers,
which is really where
the dish came from.
-Literally, like, anything
that you could take -- meat
or vegetables
that have been cooked --
and cut them up
really small or shred them
and then cook them
into a Béchamel sauce
and roll them and fry them,
is exactly the purpose
of croquetas.
And now, for about 15 minutes,
we're gonna let
the onion slowly cook
until it is soft and tender,
but not brown.
While the onion is cooking,
we're going to shred
a roast chicken.
My favorite thing about Spain
and tapas
and restaurant culture,
it's all about sharing.
So you get
these little small bites,
and you get to share
with whoever you're with.
And then that brings
the conversation around food,
but, also, because
you get to bounce
from one place to the next.
And trying
a restaurant's croqueta
is definitely the way
to find out
if you want to stay
and order more food.
If the croquetas are bad, leave.
[ Laughs ]
I have a master's degree
in biomedical engineering.
That's nothing to do
with what we're doing today.
To get me through my degree,
I cooked.
That time in my life
was what helped me make
the decision
and to switch careers.
Honestly, the fate of me
getting into Spanish cooking
is because a general manager
at one of José Andrés'
restaurants gave me a job.
You know, now my husband
is Spanish,
so half my family's in Spain.
So we go to Spain every year.
It is very much
a part of my life.
What I'm doing now is,
I'm shredding the chicken
with my hands.
I just find that, like, the
texture is better if you, like,
shred it, versus chop it.
So, we have
our 2 1/2 cups chicken.
The onions are ready.
So, roux is flour
and fat cooked together.
We're not looking for color
on the onions,
and we're also not looking
for color on the flour.
We're just going to cook out
the raw flour flavor.
So, it has to simmer.
You know,
you just bring it up to a boil,
stirring it occasionally
to keep it from browning.
And when you can tell that
it's done is when it starts
to smell a little bit toasty.
The roux is done.
And I'm just gonna go ahead
and put the cream in the milk.
You're going to add your liquid
a little bit
at a time to avoid lumps.
Okay. Now we're gonna add
2 teaspoons of salt
and about 1/2 teaspoon
of fresh grated nutmeg
and 1/8 teaspoon
of black pepper.
In Béchamel, typically
you're looking for something
that's, like,
a perfectly white sauce.
'Cause we use white pepper
and things that won't color
the final product.
But, in croquetas, we're gonna
add a whole bunch of chicken.
So it doesn't really matter.
You're able, as you whisk it,
to even further
shred the chicken.
And what I'm looking for now
is, like, consistency.
Like, no large chunks of chicken
and it all to be kind of fluid,
which it is.
We are going to spread it out
on a sheet pan.
So, this texture is going to be
the final texture
of the cooked croqueta, right?
It's creamy, it's delicious,
but it's not super-runny.
But putting it in the
refrigerator until it sets up
and solidifies is going to allow
you to shape it and roll it.
It needs to chill
for a couple of hours.
Now our croqueta mixture
has set up.
It is chilled.
To shape this, we want to try
to get even sizes.
The name of our restaurant,
Cúrate, came about
when my mother
was, like, e-mailing my husband,
Félix, and I just lists of names
and one of the words
was "curate."
But Félix didn't know
the word "curate" in English,
and he read it in Spanish
as "cúrate."
And he was like, "I love it.
It means healing yourself."
And it kind of fits to the
quality of Spanish tapas
and, like, what it's like
to sit down at a table
and share food with people.
It dawned on me that, actually,
that was what I was doing
my entire time
that I was in my wrong path
in science, was trying
to heal myself
and get through my studies
by cooking.
We're going to shape
the croquetas.
You're just going to roll them
in your hands.
By shaping them this way,
versus large ones in a circle,
they'll get hot in the center
easier.
Croquetas -- rolled.
We're gonna move on
to breading.
My favorite way to
bread things is to use panko,
but not to use it
in its big, like, chunky form,
but, actually, to blend it
into a super-fine powder.
So, we'll put the panko
in the last one.
Put the flour in the first one.
Crack an egg and put it
in the middle one
with a little bit of water.
And whisk the egg with the water
to make the egg wash.
You really want to make sure
that you have totally covered
the Béchamel
in a thin layer of flour.
So, now when you decide
to get into the egg mixture,
you want to try
to keep one hand.
So I'm making my left hand
for the eggs
and my right hand for the panko.
So, we're gonna put
these guys in here.
This will seal in
the delicious Béchamel.
If you try to use your hand
that has all the egg wash
on it in the bread crumbs,
your fingers end up
looking like little croquetas.
So we are going to avoid that.
To test to see
if your oil is hot enough --
you want them to be hot enough
to brown evenly
on the outside --
dip a little bit in
and see if it bubbles.
Another way to test is to put
a piece
or two of the breading inside
and see what happens.
If it starts bubbling up,
It's almost ready.
And you don't want to plop them
in the oil obviously
'cause you don't want
to splash oil on yourself.
So I just roll them in slowly,
put an edge in,
and then
let go of the other edge.
The other important thing
is not to overcrowd the fryer.
We can put one more here.
And at this point, we have a,
like, expression on our recipes
in our restaurant that just
says, "Cook until G.B.D. --
golden brown and delicious."
I had never gone through
a restaurant opening
when we decided to open
the Spanish tapas bar.
About a week before we opened,
I had, like, this breakdown
of, "How are we gonna train
all of the staff ourselves?"
So we called up José Andrés,
who's one of the best mentors
that anyone can ever ask for.
And he immediately hopped
on a plane himself
with three other of his
top people to come down
and spend two days with us,
just helping us
set up the systems in place
and going through our opening.
That was a lifesaver.
And it's just really nice
to be able
to call on friends like that
and have them not even think
about it
and immediately say yes.
These croquetas
look nice and golden brown,
and they're starting to puff up.
So, what you're looking for
in a well-made croqueta
is, it should be creamy and not
totally, like, solidified
on the inside, like this one is.
It just looks oozy
and delicious.
Mmm.
They're pretty perfect.
Chicken croquetas
kind of remind me
of, like, chicken potpie.
You know?
I love chicken potpie, so...
It's basically
the same thing, so...
For the recipe,
you can click the link below.
You can also, for more tips
and other recipes,
buy the "Cúrate" cookbook.
Thank you.
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