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Bacalhau à Brás (Salt Cod with Onion, Potato and Egg)

Name: Bacalhau à Brás (Salt Cod with Onion, Potato and Egg)
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 1 h 5 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Portuguese
Ingredients: 500 g salt cod; 500 g potatoes; 800 ml oil for frying; 60 ml olive oil; 2 onions; 3 cloves garlic; 1 bay leaf; 6 eggs; 0.5 tsp black pepper; 3 tbsp flat-leaf parsley; 12 black olives; salt

The Lisbon dish: salt cod soaked for two days to get the salt back out, then folded together with onion, matchstick potatoes and egg. What does the work is not how long it sits but how many times you change the water. One bowlful is enough to soak beans, because there you are putting water in; salt cod is taking salt out, and left in the same water for two days nothing happens once the fish and the water reach the same concentration. And salt cod cannot be replaced with fresh cod. It is a different material.

Steps

Put the salt cod in plenty of cold water and leave it in the fridge for 24–48 hours, changing the water four to six times. Thick loin needs 48; thin tail pieces 24. Changing it often matters more than leaving it long (soaking).
⏲ 240 min
Judge it by taste, not by the clock. Tear off a flake and chew it raw: it should taste like fish that is pleasantly seasoned. Still salty, change the water and give it six hours more.
⏲ 5 min
Squeeze it out, take off the skin and bones and pull it into coarse flakes with your fingers, along the grain. A knife cuts across the grain and it crumbles. Salted flesh splits into thick plates, and that is exactly what fresh cod does not do.
⏲ 10 min
Cut the potatoes into very fine 2mm matchsticks, rinse and dry them completely in a cloth. Fry at 170°C until pale gold, drain and salt lightly. Bought potato straws (batata palha) are fine.
⏲ 15 min
In a wide pan, cook the onions, garlic and bay leaf in the olive oil over low heat for 12–15 minutes — soft and sweet, with no colour.
⏲ 15 min
Add the flaked cod and warm it through for 2–3 minutes only. Do not boil it and do not brown it. The salt has already set the protein, so heat can do nothing but drive more water out and make it stringy.
⏲ 3 min
Take the pan off the heat. Fold in the potato straws, pour in the beaten eggs and keep stirring, using only the pan’s residual heat. Stop the moment it thickens — this is loosely bound, not scrambled egg (the same principle as carbonara).
⏲ 2 min
Add pepper and parsley and taste for salt here for the first time. How much is left in the cod varies from batch to batch, so this is the only point at which salt goes in. Scatter the olives and serve at once.
⏲ 1 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

With boiled potato instead of fried: a version exists, and in Portugal it has its own name — bacalhau à Zé do Pipo and its relatives are treated as different dishes. À Brás wants fine, crisp potato straws.
Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá: desalted cod steeped in milk, then baked with potato and onion and topped with boiled egg — a Porto dish. Same ingredient, an entirely different method.
Bacalhau à lagareiro / assado: thick loin roasted whole. Those show best what salted flesh does — splitting into thick plates — which à Brás rather hides by flaking and folding it in.
Fresh cod will not do. This is not a substitution but a different dish. See the tips.
Where the name comes from: it is said to be named after a Brás who kept a restaurant in Lisbon's Bairro Alto. Portugal is credited with over a thousand bacalhau dishes, and one is on the table at every festival and family occasion.

Tips

Taking salt out is not the same operation as putting water in. Soaking describes the purpose of soaking as making things cook evenly, and sorts soaking water into discard and keep. Salt cod is neither, and the guide gives it a section of its own: you are soaking to get something out of the ingredient. One bowl of water is enough for beans: water going into a bean never runs out. Salt cod is the reverse, and the transfer stops the moment the fish and the water reach the same concentration. Without changes of water, 48 hours is the same as six. The recipe is the number of changes, not the length of the soak.
Cold water, and in the fridge. The same guide notes that soaks over eight hours are safer in the fridge; here the soak is two days. At room temperature the fish starts to spoil on the second one.
Salt cod is not cod. The cure pulls out close to half the water and denatures the muscle protein irreversibly. Put the water back and it does not go back to what it was: the fibres have set into thick plates. That is why bacalhau dishes break into big flakes and hold them in the pan, and why fresh cod in this recipe collapses into mush. Lavash is this site's rare case of drying that reverses; cod does not come back.
It is the exact opposite direction from Eisbein. That dish spends three to five days pushing salt into meat; this one spends two days pulling salt out. Same operation, opposite direction.
Do not boil it. Salted flesh is, in a sense, already cooked. Heat can only drive more water out, and boiled it turns stringy. Step 6 is warming and nothing else.
Season at the very end. How much salt is left depends on the cut and on how thoroughly you soaked it, so seasoning partway through almost guarantees an oversalted dish (salt and seasoning).
The potato straws go in in the last thirty seconds. Added earlier they drink the moisture out of the egg and the cod and go limp. Something crisp and something soft in the same spoonful is the texture of this dish.