Ham & Bread Sauce Croquettes
Here at Church Farm (the home of Somerset Foodie), we have enjoyed hosting indoor Christmas markets featuring local food and drink producers. Every year we team up with MasterChef Champ Ping Coombes to run themed cooking demonstrations. Whilst dreaming up foodie inspiration for 'Christmas left-overs' Ping and I came up with this nifty tip for turning left over bread sauce into delicious, Spanish-style croquettes. They were an absolute triumph! The quantities in this recipe will be governed by the amount of bread sauce you have, but the basic principal is to weigh your left-over bread sauce and then use 50% of that weight in ham.
The lovely aromatic Christmas spices of clove, nutmeg and mace in the bread sauce work brilliantly with ham and just a touch of parsley to add freshness. The soft texture the bread sauce inside the croquette is just perfect - hardly discernible from a traditional béchamel sauce base. It's well worth making extra bread sauce just so you can make these little beauties afterwards!
I use Nigella's Bread Sauce recipe. Nigella must feed around 25 people for Christmas as the volume of bread sauce that her recipe yields is quite spectacular!
You can make and refrigerate the croquettes for at least 4 or 5 hours before you actually want to cook them - alternatively you can freeze them before you cook them.
Recipe for Ham & Bread Sauce Croquettes
1 x quantity of left-over bread sauce
½ x quantity of ham in comparison to the weight of bread sauce that you have, finely diced
Roughly ½ tablespoon of flat leaf parsley, finely chopped
For the breadcrumb coating:
Panko breadcrumbs
Beaten egg
Plain flour
1. Start by weighing out the bread sauce and then finely dicing 50% of that weight in cooked ham. Mix the cold bread sauce together with the ham and some finely chopped parsley.
2. Next form small balls of the mixture and drop them into some flour. Good tip here is to have slightly wet hands when rolling out the balls.
3. Roll the balls around in the flour and then dip them in beaten egg before covering them in panko breadcrumbs. Repeat until all your croquettes are evenly coated in breadcrumbs.
4. Fill a medium sized saucepan around a quarter full with vegetable oil - you want about 2½-3'' depth of oil. Heat until the oil reaches 160°C or until a small piece of bread instantly sizzles when dropped in. Fry the croquettes in batches of 5 or 6 for around 1 minute or until golden and crispy.
5. These a delicious served with Ping's Tomato & Ginger Sambal Ketchup....yum!
