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Do you know ...

          ... the saltfish speciality Bacalao?

 

Bacalao is different from other fish specialities. One might say it is more salt than fish. In the kitchen it doesn’t require any further seasoning with salt - on the contrary - it needs soaking in water to make the hard, dry and salty flesh edible. But how is a succulent North Sea or Atlantic cod turned into a block of fish that is stiff as a poker?

The first stages in the production of Bacalao are the same as those involved in normal fish processing. The fish is caught, gutted and left to bleed on board a trawler. When it reaches the on-shore fish factory, it is cleaned once more before it can be either processed further or deep frozen - today, deep freezing enables the fishing industry to compensate for the fluctuations in the quantities of fish caught.

It is not until the fish has been divided into two fillet halves - mostly done by machine - and its backbone has been removed that the typical process for Bacalao begins: The cod fillets are placed in a tub, roughly the size of a standard pallet, and arranged in layers with coarse salt - mostly sea salt - between them. The large grains of salt prevent the fish parts from sticking together. Then the entire contents of the tub are watered so that the filets do not dry out too quickly. The fish is left in the brine for two to four days.

Then a pallet is placed over the tub, the whole thing is turned over and the tub is removed. The brine runs off, and the fish is now dry-salted for another four to five days. This period is also known as maturing.

In the next stage of processing, the fish is graded according to size. Each group of the different sizes is stacked once more and salt is added between the layers as before. The fish processors have their own recipes. Some use only sea salt, others only rock salt while others use a blend of both. Prepared in this way, the fish is then chilled and can be sold as saltfish or is dried out in a wind tunnel for four to five days. As a result, the proportion of water in the overall weight of the fish is reduced to well under fifty per cent. Only now may it be called Bacalao and be sold as such.

Business operations concerning stockfish and Bacalao is centuries old with Norway being the principal dealer in Europe today. The biggest market for this product is Portugal. Traditionally, esco supplies large quantities of rock salt, so-called "fishery salt", to customers in Norway operating in the fish business.