It was Iberian Week at Lidl. If you are too snobby to shop there you are really missing out: I can't get everything there, but every week is a different food culture; Japan, Italy, Greece...
Sobrasada is a bit forgotten in the UK. Nduja, its spicier italian cousin is on menus (pizzas especially) and iis easy to find, but Sobrasada isn't really.
Sobrasada is primarily spiced with paprika rather than the chilli in nduja, Think of it as spreadable chorizo.
Method
For the salt cod
Soak the saffron strands in a little cold milk in the fridge while the cod is salting
Cover the fish in salt. I do this in a bag so I can keep turning it over easily
You can do this overnight, but I think that's too much. For this dish I think two to three hours is enough.
rinse the salt from the cod under the tap and put it in a pan it just fits in with the saffron milk and enough milk to reach the top of the fish. Gently poach it in the milk while you make the sauce
For the sauce
Make the sauce but putting anchovies, garlic and fennel seeds in a cold pan with some olive oil
Put on a medium heat and watch as it heats up. When the garlic starts to go very slightly golden, throw in the sherry and reduce it by about half.
Add the tomatoes, capers, olives and half of the chopped parsley and cook for a few minutes. then take it off the heat.
For the toast
Toast the bread and rub the top side with a garlic clove, then spread the sobrasada onto it
Put a few nice spoonsful of the sauce on top of that with the rest of the parsley, and place the poached cod on to of that
That’s it!
Ingredients
- Skinless cod fillets
- Salt to cover
- A dozen of so saffron strands
- Milk to cover half a teaspoon of fennel seeds
- Anchovies to taste. I love their salty little arses but they could take over and the cod is salted so I put about 3 in
- Olives. I used about 12 and sliced them up
- A handful of capers
- A small glass of dry sherry
- A dozen baby tomatoes, halved
- Two cloves of garlic. One chopped to put in the sauce, one peeled to rub on the toast
- Enough sobrasada to thickly cover the toast