What We’re Cooking This Week: Leek and Cheese Fritters

Jim Dixon wrote about food for WW for more than 20 years, but these days most of his time is spent at his olive oil-focused specialty food business Wellspent Market. Jim’s always loved to eat, and he encourages his customers to cook by sending them recipes every week through his newsletter. We’re happy to have him back creating some special dishes just for WW readers.

Glamorgan County, in south Wales abolished by the English Parliament in 1974, provided much of the coal that powered the early years of the Industrial Revolution. All those miners needed to eat, and dairy farmers around the Welsh village of Caerphilly developed a salty, moist and crumbly cheese for them to carry underground. Local butchers made sausages from pork and Caerphilly cheese.

The Glamorgan sausages outlived the coal. The mine owners overexpanded during the boom years but failed to modernize, and by the mid-1920s productivity had dropped. The Great Depression sealed Glamorgan’s fate, driving unemployment to 40% by the start of the Second World War. At some point during those lean times the struggling Welsh stopped putting pork in Glamorgan sausages. They made them from leeks and breadcrumbs, flavored with the local Caerphilly cheese and bound with eggs.

These fritters use the same ingredients but streamline the traditional approach, which calls for subjecting sausage-shaped fritters to a flour-egg-breadcrumb dip before deep frying. The sliced leeks get cooked in olive oil, then mixed with a few other ingredients. Caerphilly cheese sounds a lot like Mexican-style cotija cheese from Salem’s Don Froylan Creamery, and widely available Japanese-style panko makes a lighter fritter than the coarse breads of 19th century Wales.

If I’m cooking fritters, I like to make a big batch. They’re nice to eat right out of the skillet, perfect for a starter and hanging out in the kitchen before sitting down to eat. And they keep well so you can just heat them back up in a skillet; I’ll sometimes repurpose fritters as burgers, putting them between toasted buns with melty cheese and the mustard-ketchup-mayo blend I call hamburger flavor sauce.

Recipe for about a dozen 2-to-3-inch fritters

2 leeks, cleaned, halved lengthwise, and sliced thinly*

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil, plus more for frying

6 ounces cotija cheese (½ of a Don Froylan round)

1 cup panko or breadcrumbs

Handful of fresh mint, chopped (about ½ cup loosely packed), optional

4 eggs

½ teaspoon kosher-style sea salt

¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

*Clean the leeks by cutting off the darkest green top, then splitting them lengthwise while keeping the root end intact. Open the leaves and rinse out any dirt under running cold water, then shake dry.

Cook the sliced leeks in the olive oil for about 10 minutes or until soft. Let cool while you mix the rest of the ingredients.

Crumble the cheese into a bowl, add the panko, mint, eggs, salt, and pepper. Mix well, then stir in the cooked leeks. Heat a heavy skillet over medium for a few minutes, then add enough olive oil to cover the bottom.

Use two spoons to form fritters about the size of an egg. This is the classic French technique for quenelles, and this video shows how it’s done, although mine end up a little bigger and flatter. But the pair of spoons helps compress the mix and helps the fritter hold up in the skillet.

Set the fritters in the hot oil gently, then use a spoon to gently flatten and shape them. Work in batches without crowding the pan, and wait about 5 minutes before touching them so the bottom gets nicely browned. Gently flip with a spatula and cook the other side for about 5 minutes or until brown. Eat hot, at room temp, or as a burger.