Fish Curry

A kind of Goan Fish Curry

I call this a Goan fish curry because it is a curry, has fish in it, and, whenever I cook it, I look up these two recipes which are both titled 'Goan Fish Curry', the first by the ever knowleadgeable Anjum Anand and the second by Felicity Cloake*. 

Now, I know nothing about Goan Fish Curries apart from what these two lasses tell me.  I tend to get them confused with Thai Fish Curries and so you can call this a Thai Fish Curry, if you want.  It's a fish curry.  I like it.

Anyway, when I made it this time, I had a little bit of the paste left over from making aubergines and green beans a couple of days before; and that contains pureed fresh lemongrass, which is kind of a Thai thing.  I'm going to recreate how I made it today, but everything is very fluid.  I think we might just call today's effort Coconut Fish Curry.

Ingredients

For the paste:

• Two to three shallots or a small onion
• Three - four hearts of lemon grasss
• Two - three chillies, depending on their hotness
• A thumb sized piece of ginger (2 cm cubed)
• Five or six cloves of garlic
• Two teaspoons of freshly roast cumin
• One teaspoon of powdered coriander (more, if you like coriander)
• One teaspoon of tumeric
• Two teaspoons of garam masala

Whizz this all up in a small blender with a splash of water.  If thie ingredients given vary a little from the paste shown in the Green Beans and Aubergine recipe, that gives you some idea of the boundaries of variability. 

You'll need about half this paste for four helpings or the 500g of fish which I have used in the rest of this.

Spicing in addition

Because I felt like it, I added

• three teaspoons of black mustard seed,
• about 5 cm of cinammon stick
• a desert spoon of amchur, which is dried mango powder. 

The amchur is there to add sourness instead of the vinegar that Felicity Cloake recommends; it adds a lovely, cheek-sucking sourness, but you're definitely not going to find it in Tesco.   I usually add it to the fish curries.  Here's some pictures of the amchur, and the mustard seed and cinammon (fear my use of the Oxford comma):

 For the sauce

• One small tetrapack ( ~ 300g?) of pulped tomato, or two tomatoes grated, or half a tub of baby plum tomatoes chopped finely
• One tin of coconut cream
• One onion (or another onion)
• Coconut oil (optional)
• Corn oil or other 'flavourless' oil e.g. groundnut oil.
• Fish sauce (possibly optional, but I think it's really quite essential - I use Blue Dragon)

Fish

As Felicity Cloake says, you can do almost any white fish here.  The reason I started doing these fish curries is that in my local supermarket you regularly get packets of hake marked down from £4.00 to £1.00, so I grab a couple of packets of those and freeze them until I need them.  Here's a picture of the two packets I used today:

Actually, that's a picture of most of the sauce ingredients, only I changed my mind at the last minute and used a tin of coconut cream instead of the tetra pack. 

The two packets of fish probably come to about 500g in total.  You could use more, but if you used less then you'd probably need less sauce and should use the smaller pack of coconut cream.

Method.

Put a glug of coconut oil (if you're using it) and another glug of corn oil or flavourless oil in a saucepan, and put the saucepan on the heat. 

When the oil is well hot, throw in chopped onion and let that fry for around fifteen minutes, to let the water come out of the onion and let the carbohydrates caramelise.  The saucepan doesn't need to be on top heat for this slow frying, but the heat under the saucepan should be turned up again for the next bit if you've turned it down to fry the onion more slowly.

Throw in the mustard seed and cinammon stick (or whatever whole spices you are using) with the oil hot, and stir for thirty seconds.  Then add the paste, and turn the heat down again if necessary.  Add the spoonful of amchur a minute or so after the paste.  Keep stirring - the mixture will probably 'catch' on the bottom; that's OK because a little bit of catching adds to the flavour.  Keep stirring to loosen the catching so it doesn't burn.  If the catching bothers you, add the amchur later, as you add the tomatoes, because I think the powdered spices are responsible for the catching. 

Fry for two - three minutes or until the oil starts coming out of the mixture and all the water has evaporated.

Throw in your pulped tomato, which ever version you are using, and stir and cook for another two to three minutes.  Add the creamed coconut and the fish sauce. 

This is where I have to make a warning; the fish sauce probably is essential, but be careful not to add too much.  I nearly did that this evening, when I put in a large 'glug,' which, in hindsight, I estimate to be about 30 ml - you're probably best off starting with half that, or two to three teaspoons (15 ml).  Fish sauce is smelly, but a little bit of the type of smelly that fish sauce is enhances the flavour of the other stuff in the mix.  The smelly works best when the amount added means that your tastebuds are just under the edge of knowing it is there; add too much and you've got something that smells and tastes like bad socks.

Let this mixture simmer away for ten minutes (turn the heat down again), stirring all the time, reducing in volume.

Then add your chopped fish.  One of the problems with the cheap hake is that it needs to be checked for bones and the skin taken off.  That's not difficult; just tedious.  Here's a piece of hake half-way through the deskinning:

What I would do now, after having separated enough skin from the fish, is press down firmly on the white bit and just pull at the skin; it comes away quite cleanly.

Here's a picture of the roughly 500g of white fish skinned and chopped:

Add the fish to the tomato and coconut curry mixture.

Let the fish simmer away for ten minutes or so, so that the fish is cooked through, stirring, then turn the heat down to keep the curry warm while you cook your rice.

I eat it with a dollop of yoghurt, but then I eat everything with a dollop of yoghurt:

I would have squeezed half a lemon over, if I had remembered.

And that's your basic fish curry.  It might be Goan.  It might be Thai.  It certainly contains coconut.


*If you haven't come across Felicity Cloake yet, then you are missing a treat.  She approaches recipes with the zeal of a postgraduate scientist who likes her food and is being paid to do what she would do anyway; she writes columns in which she tries to distill the essence of a dish, and some of those columns have ended up in a boo, Perfect, which is kind of a short-cut to everything you wanted to know about cooking.  My only gripe with this book is that it actuallly doesn't contain everything you need, althouigh you certainly need what is contained within it; it needs a second and third volume to cover everything that Felicity's investigated - a lot of the stuff I've found useful (a perfect beef wellington, for example) is still only findable online.