Make your junk food more wholesome with homemade no-fry Jagarico croquettes【SoraKitchen】

Just like mom used to reconstitute.

Among the many snacks available in Japan, the small crunchy potato sticks Jagarico are an enduring favorite of many. But no matter how good they are, it’s hard not to fight the urge to mix things up after the 1,000th or so cup.

Luckily, another thing that makes Jagarico great is that you can apparently make croquettes from them that don’t require any frying. There are lots of recipes for this on the Internet, and even Calbee — the company that makes Jagarico — posted one to Japan’s biggest recipe site Cookpad, so we thought we’d give it a try.

The ingredients are simple: a cup of Jagarico, 100 milliliters (three ounces) of milk, and bread crumbs.

First, heat the milk just to a small boil in a pot. Just remember to use 100 milliliters for each 60-gram (two-ounce) cup of Jagarico that you plan to use.

Then pour the milk over the Jagarico in a large bowl.

Wait for about one minute while the milk does what most people hate when it comes to breakfast cereal and make the sticks soggy.

Next, mush up the soggy Jagarico. Our chef Mr. Sato used a plastic bag over his hand, but we might advise using a fork or spoon, because the milk is still probably hot and it’s less wasteful.

If done properly, you should have a nice wet, hot mess like this.

The next step is to roll the soggy snacks into balls. For each cup of Jagarico used, you should get three balls. In this case, Mr. Sato had used two cups, so he came out with six balls.

After that, put the bread crumbs in a frying pan and heat them slightly. Don’t use oil, however, since as we said this is a no-fry recipe. The pan is just being used as a heater to brown the crumbs.

This part is a little tricky as heating them too much will cause them to burn up. Just add low heat and move them around frequently in the pan until they are a golden brown, then remove from the heat immediately.

Then coat the balls in the bread crumbs. By this point the surface of the balls may have dried too much to pick up the crumbs, so feel free to moisten them with some water from a spray bottle.

Apparently Mr. Sato got hungry along the way and added yet another cup for a total of nine balls. At this point it’s fine to just eat the balls as is, since it’s just Jagariko, milk, and bread.

However, for maximum enjoyment you should put them in a toaster oven for two to three minutes.

And there you have it, a nice crispy croquette fresh out of the toaster oven!

These little balls pack in all the flavor of Jagarico but with a whole new warm and soft texture, rather than the crunchy brittle sticks we all know and love.

And what’s this? It looks like Mr. Sato had a surprise in that late addition and put some cheese inside a few of the balls.

That’s just one way to enhance these things, but the sky’s the limit in making your favorite Jagarico croquette, from adding other fillings to sauces and spices.

Also, for those living in areas where Jagarico is hard to come by, our experiments with cooking Jagarico Aligot showed that you can probably achieve similar end results with Pringles, in which case slightly less milk might work better too. So no excuses; get out there and start cooking your junk food!

Source: Cookpad/Calbee
Photos: ©SoraNews24
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