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Esqueixada (Hand-Torn Raw Salt Cod Salad)

Name: Esqueixada (Hand-Torn Raw Salt Cod Salad)
Prep time: 30 min
Total time: 30 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Spanish
Ingredients: 400 g salt cod (thick loin); 3 ripe tomatoes; 1 onion; 0.5 red pepper; 12 black olives; 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil; 1 tbsp sherry or red wine vinegar; if needed salt

A Catalan salt cod salad. Desalted cod is never heated: it is torn into shreds by hand and dressed with tomato, onion, olive oil and vinegar. The name comes from the Catalan verb for tearing, and the cod never meets a knife.

Ingredients

4servings

Steps

Put the salt cod in plenty of cold water and leave it in the fridge for 36-48 hours, changing the water four to six times (soaking).
Tear off a flake and chew it raw. It is ready when it tastes like pleasantly seasoned fish. Still salty, change the water and give it six hours more.
⏲ 2 min
Squeeze it dry and take off the skin and bones. Unless the cod has already been frozen at −20°C for at least 7 days, freeze it now for that long and thaw it in the fridge (freezing and thawing).
Tear the cod into fine shreds with your fingers, along the grain. No knife. Lay it on kitchen paper to drain once more.
⏲ 10 min
Seed and dice the tomatoes. Put them in a bowl with the onion and pepper.
⏲ 5 min
Add the cod and dress with the olive oil and vinegar. Taste, and add salt only if it needs it. Top with the olives and serve cold, straight away.
⏲ 2 min

Variations

With peppers. Many cooks add finely chopped red or green pepper. Some recipes add aubergine.
With hard-boiled egg. A common garnish alongside the olives.
Restaurant style. The photograph on this page is a restaurant plate, on lettuce with cress on top.
Bacalhau à brás. Hand-flaked salt cod warmed and bound with egg, from Portugal. The same ingredient taken to the heat.

Tips

No knife. Tearing by hand keeps the grain and gives the texture.
Salt last, and only if needed. What is left in the cod comes first.
A summer dish, served cold.
Neither salt nor vinegar kills parasites. Nothing here cooks the cod. Use cod frozen at −20°C for at least 7 days, the same standard as kakinoha-zushi.

More detail and the reasons why (2)

Salt cod that never meets the heat. Bacalhau à brás says "Salted flesh is, in a sense, already cooked." and so only warms the cod. Esqueixada leaves out even the warming. The flake that dish chews raw to check the desalting is, here, the finished dish. So the cooking in this recipe is the desalting, and checking the seasoning is the same thing as checking it is done.
The "Catalan ceviche". English Wikipedia notes it is sometimes called that because the fish is raw and dressed, and adds that the cod is salt-cured and dried. In ceviche the lime's acid firms the flesh. Here the salt did that long ago, and the vinegar is only a dressing added at the table.