Bacalhau à Brás
One of the most famous of Portugal's proverbial thousand ways with salt cod; tradition credits it to a tavern keeper in Lisbon's Bairro Alto. Everything is decided in the last two minutes: the eggs go into a pan over the lowest heat and are stirred until they thicken and bind the ingredients but do not set into scrambled egg. The dish should be creamy and faintly moist — set egg turns it into a dry, crumbling mass.
Your own work in that: 0 min.
- Desalting the cod 2160 min
- Potatoes 25 min
- Cod and onion 15 min
- Eggs 5 min
Step by step
0 / 8 doneDesalt the cod for 36 hours
Cover the cod with cold water and keep it in the fridge 36 hours, changing the water every 8. Without changes the salt stops moving into the water and the process stalls halfway — the fish stays inedibly salty.
Ingredients: 500 g salt cod · 3000 ml water
Steep briefly and shred by hand
Cover the desalted cod with boiling water, leave 10 minutes without cooking, drain and pull it into fine shreds with your fingers, discarding skin and bones. Boiled cod toughens; steeped it stays soft and falls into fibres on its own.
Ingredients: 500 g salt cod · 3000 ml water
Fine shreds by hand — never with a knife.Cut the potatoes into fine matchsticks
Cut the potatoes into matchsticks, ideally on a mandoline, then rinse off the starch and dry them. Thicker sticks never crisp, and wet ones carry water into hot oil.
Ingredients: 700 g potatoes · 800 ml oil
Fry the potatoes crisp
Fry the matchsticks in batches, 3 minutes each, in oil at 180°C, until golden and crisp, then drain on paper — all the batches take about 25 minutes in total. In batches — too many at once drops the temperature and the potatoes come out soft instead of crisp.
Ingredients: 700 g potatoes · 800 ml oil
Matchstick thin and golden — in batches, not all at once.Soften the onion slowly in oil
Cook the onion with the garlic and bay in olive oil for 15 minutes over low heat, until soft and translucent, without browning. Three onions reduce to a third — they give the dish the sweetness that balances the salt of the cod.
Ingredients: 3 pcs onions · 4 cloves garlic · 80 ml olive oil · 2 pcs bay leaves
Fold in the cod and warm it
Add the shredded cod to the onion and cook 3 minutes, stirring. The fish only needs warming and to take up the oil — cooked longer it dries out and the fibres turn tough.
Ingredients: 500 g salt cod · 3000 ml water
Add the potatoes and turn the heat down
Tip in the fried potatoes, toss and turn the heat down to the minimum. The potatoes go in last and only briefly — in contact with moisture they soften within a minute, and the point is that some stay crisp.
Ingredients: 700 g potatoes · 800 ml oil
Pour in the eggs over low heat and stir
Pour in the beaten eggs with the pepper and stir vigorously over the lowest heat for 1–2 minutes, until they thicken and are no longer runny. Take the pan off the heat while the mixture is still creamy — the residual heat finishes it. The eggs should bind everything into a creamy mass, not set into dry scrambled egg. Taste and add salt if needed, scatter with olives and parsley and serve at once.
Ingredients: 8 pcs eggs · 80 g black olives · 4 tbsp parsley · 1 tsp black pepper · 1 pinch salt
Lowest heat, a minute or two — creamy, not dry.
Before you start
Potatoes from a packet
Many Portuguese homes and bars use ready-made very fine fries called batata palha, sold in bags. Not a cheat but common practice — if you find them you save half an hour and the deep-frying.
Bacalhau à Brás versus à Gomes de Sá
Two different dishes from the same ingredients. À Brás uses matchstick potatoes with raw egg stirred in; à Gomes de Sá uses sliced potatoes, is baked, and the eggs are served hard boiled in quarters.
Eat it straight away
One of the few dishes that genuinely cannot be reheated: the egg sets and the potatoes soften completely. The cod can be desalted and shredded a day ahead and the onion softened in the morning — the rest takes a quarter of an hour.
