Zurrukutuna Basque Salt-Cod Garlic Bread Soup

Zurrukutuna is Basque, a salt-cod garlic bread soup from the north, and it is not just any sopa de ajo with fish dropped in. The bacalao gives the broth its body, the garlic gives it its bite, and the dried sopako bread thickens it until the spoon leaves a slow track through the bowl. This is Lenten cooking with a backbone. No meat, no fuss, and no need to lean on an egg for richness.

The bread decides the soup. Use sopako if you can, that hard Basque bread made for soups, and toast it in the garlic oil before the broth goes in. Then simmer it gently until it swells and softens into the soup without turning to glue. Rush it with soft bread or a hard boil and you get paste, and paste is not supper.

If you're far from Euskadi, no hace falta haber pisado España. Use a dense country loaf or sourdough cut thin and dried hard in a low oven; it will taste a little less wheaty than sopako, but it will behave. Frozen desalted bacalao is fine if it's good, and pimiento choricero paste from a jar saves you twenty minutes. Fresh cod is another soup. This one asks for salt cod, garlic, bread, and patience. Siempre sale, si lo sigues.