Lentil Croquetas with Herby Green Sauce
I wanted these to be vegan because a vegan bar snack seems like a nice way to balance that it’s fried - but I used egg to roll the croquetas in the bread crumbs… so… alas they are not vegan. But they are also not a heavy cheese bomb, so at least I was able to accomplish that.
Croquetas are time consuming, they aren’t a particularly easy dish to DIY but I was honestly impressed with how these came out - and I bought the lentils pre-made from Trader Joe’s, a step you could easily skip and do yourself, but I found that it made the more laborious part of the recipe feel pretty easy when the filling was basically pre-made.
I didn’t make this four times to photograph it and I hadn’t made croquetas in years and I got a nice even coating on the very first try. I’m going to chalk that up to the traditional method of bread crumb roll, egg roll, breadcrumb roll.
croquetas
trader joe’s steamed lentils, 17.6 oz package
1 cup breadcrumbs
1 egg
3 tbs olive oil
1 tbs zatar (I use zatar, a middle eastern spice blend, a lot. if you don’t have some i fully recommend getting some or making your own)
1 tsp minced roasted garlic (go ahead and use the jar like I did, again the filling is the easy part)
vegetable oil for frying
herby green sauce
large handful of cilantro, chopped
1/2 handful of parsley, chopped
juice of 1 lemon and another for serving
1 tsp roasted garlic
sour cream, mayonnaise, yogurt or cream cheese - that’s the joy of this kind of dipping sauce, you can really make it with whatever you’d like. I made it with sour cream here.
start with the sauce so that you can eat the croquetas fresh and hot.
blend your base of choice (mayo, sour cream, yogurt or cream cheese) with chopped herbs, lemon and garlic. put aside in fridge to keep cool.
blend lentil package, olive oil, garlic and zatar in a blender until smooth and add salt and pepper as needed, to taste.
roll into gold ball sized balls.
crack eggs and scramble to create a wash in a bowl. in another bowl, add breadcrumbs.
roll the lentil balls in breadcrumbs and then egg wash and then breadcrumbs.
heat up vegetable oil so that when you test it, it sizzles right away. fry the balls changing them from breaded balls into croquetas! try and get as even a brown as possible. I find that if you pull them off a tiny bit lighter than you’d like, because they get a bit darker as they cool - kind of like a tan.