Croquettes are usually made from scratch. To make it from scratch, check out my Basic Beef Croquettes recipe.
Today, however, I made them out of leftovers.
I had some leftover ground-meat filling that I made for Koube in Beet Soup, as well as the crust of some bread that I used for the Koube- Middle Eastern Dumplings.
Ingredients:
Eye balling the leftover meat mixture, it contained about:
½ lb ground beef
1 small diced onion
1 cup chopped parsley
½ teaspoon sweet paprika
¼ teaspoon baharat for koube
salt and pepper
Additional ingredients:
1 egg
About 1 cup homemade breadcrumb
Preparation:
The leftover meat mixture already had almost all of the ingredients needed to make either croquettes or a meatloaf, but the amount of mixture wasn’t enough for a decent size meatloaf, so I decided on croquettes. All I had to add was an egg and breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs I figured I could make myself, using the leftover bread crust.
I placed the crust in a food processor and processed it into some kind of breadcrumbs. Some of the harder pieces refused to become tiny crumbs and no matter how long I processed them, they kept their shape and size. I decided to add them to my croquette mixture, anyway, and see what happens.
The next step, which I usually try to avoid doing inside the house, was frying the croquettes. This time, since I only had a small amount of meat, I made an exception, and turned on my indoor stove. I heated some oil in a frying pan (enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan), and while it was heating up, I shaped my croquettes.
You basically take a piece of the meat mixture, the size of a ping pong ball, shape it as a ball between your hands, then press it a little to flatten it and give it an oval shape.
When the oil turned hot, I placed the croquettes in the pan, and fried them on medium high heat, for about 1-2 minutes on each side, until they were nicely browned.
I removed them from the pan and placed them on a plate covered with paper towel to absorb extra oil.
And boy, did they come out delicious!!! We finished them in less than half an hour.
