Fish Croquettes

Dr Marie took me, little Sonya and our neighbour's two boys to Papaya at Northfield for a Sri Lankan meal when she came home from Sri Lanka in Januray this year.  She ordered Sri Lankan fish cutlets for us as starters and they were delightful and delicious.  I have eaten various fish cutlets which Dr Marie had ordered from various suppliers but they were always not quite right and the fish cutlets from Papaya were the best.  I told Auntie Marie I would make fish cutlets one day.

And today, I am making my own fish cutlets, with the help of Dr Marie's advice and as these are not Sri Lankan fish cutlets, I am going to call these snacks as "Fish Croquettes" and not fish cutlets.

Ingredients:

2 tins of tuna in brine - drained weight 220 grams
cooked potato - net weight 220 grams
ginger 10 grams, garlic 10 grams - I peeled these, sliced them, and then used a granite pestle and mortar to pound them into a fine pulp - you really do not want a lump of ginger or garlic in your mouth when you are eating these fish croquettes
coriander leaves with stems - 25 grams - I washed and dried them before slicing them finely
1/2 a green chilli - de-seeded, and diced finely
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground coriander 
1 large yolk of a free range egg

Note: Sri Lankans would not use coriander but curry leaves.  In addition, I have not seen the use of turmeric, cumin and coriander in their fish cutlets.  Auntie Marie was from India and she would use these three spices for her Indian cutlets. When Auntie Marie made Indian cutlets, she would add an egg yolk to the mixture and I would follow Dr Marie's way of making these types of snacks. 

You want to use your right hand to mix the above together, and making sure there are no lumps and all the ingredients are mixed together homogeneously. 

Then shape the mixture into 9 equal size croquettes. You then want to coat each croquette with flour [plain white flour is good] and then beat up an egg and coat the floured croquettes with the beaten egg with your right hand, and roll the croquette with Japanese bread crumbs with your left hand.  You can see in the picture, I have flour on one dish, beaten egg on another, and bread crumbs on a third bowl.

It is important you have the croquettes the same size as when you fry them, they all take the same amount of time to cook.  I physically weighed every croquette and the weight ranged from 54 - 55 grams each. 

I then freeze these croquettes, which may take about 6 hours before deep frying them from frozen. Croquettes fry better when deep fried from frozen. 

I used about 750 ml of vegetable oil and fried the croquettes at around 180 C. I deep fried the croquettes in batches and after the last batch, I threw the oil away. 

My fish croquettes!

The funny colour of the picture is because it is late at about 6 pm and there is no natural light!

Fish croquettes

The two missing fish croquettes are waiting for little sweetie Sonya to eat when she comes home next weekend. Auntie Marie is going to freeze the croquettes for little Sonya.