Ever wonder how those funny little snackbar batons are made? Ever thought it might be fun to spend an afternoon making your own? There's no denying croquettes take time to make but the feeling of satisfaction that comes from eating the 'fruits' of your labour is like no other.

This is our attempt at following the recipe from chef Jeroen de Zeeuw (of restaurant Spijs in Purmerend), ably demonstrated (in Dutch) on FoodTube.nl.

Ingredients

For the meat

• 500--600 grams beef (preferrably, rundersucade)
• One small onion, finely chopped
• One leek, washed and chopped
• Two carrots, washed and chopped
• Red wine
• Salt and black pepper to season

For the roux

• 60 grams butter
• 60 grams plain flour
• One litre chicken stock

For the coating

• Plain flour
• Egg whites
• Bread crumbs

Method

First, start the beef cooking as this will take longest. Slice the meat into big chunks, about two to three inches square, and season with black pepper and salt. Heat some oil in a large pan and throw in the meat, stirring so it cooks on all sides.

When the meat is browned, add the onion. After a minute or two, when the onion is soft, add a liberal splash of red wine and let the beef cook in the liquid. (The wine’s acidity will soften the meat, making it easy to shred.) Add the carrots, leek and enough chicken stock to just cover everything in the pan. Leave this to cook slowly for two hours.

Stewing the beef in wine

Prepare the roux by melting the butter in a pan, then stirring in the flour until it reaches a 'sandy' consistency. This is the basis of the croquette filling--you don’t want it to be runny or you’ll end up with soggy croquettes--so add more flour, if necessary.

The roux should be brown in colour, achieved by melting the butter at a high temperature so its sugars start to burn. At a lower temperature, the roux will be light yellowish, as will the resultant sauce.

Next, add 300--400 ml of chicken stock (depending on how moist you want your croquettes to be) and stir continuously—don’t whisk as this will destroy the structure of the roux, making it sweet—until the ingredients are combined into a rich brown sauce, called salpicon.

Now remove the cooked beef from the pan, discarding the garniture and cooking juices. Pull away any lumps of fat from the beef and discard these too. Run the meat very briefly through a food processor. Then stir it into the slightly cooled but still warm roux until you have a consistent mix. Taste and season; you’ve made your croquette filling!

Mixing the brown roux and beef

Lay a generous square of cling film on a work surface and arrange a 1--1.5 inch ‘sausage’ of filling across the square, near to the front edge, leaving a few inches at either side. You can do this with a piping bag (with an appropriately sized nozzle/hole) or by spooning the mixture onto the film as neatly as possible.

Pull the front edge of the cling film over the sausage so it is completely wrapped. Then twist the cling film at the sides of the sausage to make ‘handles’ and—this is the tricky part—use them to roll the sausage across the remaining cling film (till it’s all wrapped round), then back and forth across the work surface to give the sausage a nice round shape. Repeat from the beginning till the filling is used up and put the sausages in the freezer.

Rolling the croquette filling

Once the sausages are lightly frozen (hard but not too cold to handle), chop them into 3-inch segments (discarding the odd-shaped ends, if you prefer) and unwrap them from the cling film. Now dust them in flour, dip them in egg white and finally bread crumbs. Repeat with the egg white and bread crumbs.

Make sure you cover the entire croquette with each layer of coating so the frozen filling is completely sealed. They’re ready! Either cook straight away or put the croquettes back in the freezer until you want them.

To cook, deep fry the croquettes two or three at a time, depending on the size of your pan or deep fat fryer. Cook for 4--5 minutes if thawed and 7--8 minutes if deep frozen, in oil of 180 degrees. (Hotter oil will burn the crust before the filling is cooked.)

Eet smakelijk!

• Use beef with plenty of fat, like rundersucade, to make sure your croquettes are full of flavour. But remember to remove the fat after stewing the beef: during the slow cooking, the flavour from the fat will seep through the meat and you can discard the chewy grizzle that’s left.
• Make easy-as-sin bread crumbs from rusks (beschuiten), either blitzed in a food processor or smashed with a pestle and mortar.
• Test the temperature of the oil by throwing in a ball of the egg and bread crumb gloop that’s inevitably left over after coating the croquettes. The ball should sizzle and roll in the oil as soon as it hits the surface.
• Take care when you drop each croquette into the oil; let them fall away from you—not towards you—so you don’t get splashed with scalding oil!

Anna Ritchie / Marijn Koolen