Cooking Fish

স্যামোন দোপিঁয়াজা 

Salmon Dopiyaza

Salmon dopiaza servd with veggie biriyani.
I obviously went a little overboard with the onion placement,
I'm sorry you can't really see the fish!

A lot of fish that featured in my childhood was cooked delicately, as lightly spiced stews. I wasn't a big fan of these then, but I do want to know how to cook them now. Unfortunately, my experiments to retrace these recipes haven't yielded any postable results yet. Until they do, the below is an easy recipe for salmon that I often refer back to. It's cooked a little bit like meat, because salmon is both rich and tough enough to survive the process. There are a few other fish we normally cook like this at home - eel being the first that comes to mind, though that would be more cumin-heavy. The onion base works great as sauce with texture, and I could eat it by itself, something I rarely say about fish based sauces! 

Ingredients:

• 400.00g filleted salmon
• 3.00 medium onions
• 1.50 teaspoons of garlic paste
• 1.50 teaspoons of ginger paste
• 1.00 teaspoon of powdered turmeric
• 1.00 teaspoon of powdered coriander
• A pinch of cumin
• Powdered chilli, to taste
• Salt, to taste
• Half a red pepper
• Fresh chilli, to taste
• Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Method:

• Finely chop the onions
• Put a pan onto the stove on medium heat, and add a generous amount of vegetable oil
• Once the oil has heated, add the onions and fry till they soften - around 6 to 7 minutes
• Add the turmeric and mix in, and let onions cook for a further minute
• Add the garlic and ginger pastes, along with a dash of water if the onions have begun to go dry
• As the mixture is cooking, add the coriander, cumin, chilli and salt. Stir thoroughly to mix, and cook for 5 minutes
• As the spice base is cooking, prep the salmon. Hold the fillets under warm running water, and rub the skin to descale the fish. This is important, as you don't want to end up with loose scales mixed into your curry

Salmon laid out on the onion base

• Cut the fish up into smaller pieces if desired, and add to the pot. Lay the fish carefully on top of the spice base, making sure none of the fish is in direct contact with the pot 
• Cook uncovered for 10 minutes, adding a dash of water near the 6 minute mark if the liquid in the pot has dried up, especially if you're aiming for a lot of curry sauce
• Make sure to never put a lid on the dish - this will cook the fish too quickly and may cause it to break up. Instead of stirring the onions, give the entire pot a gentle shake now and again to avoid breaking up the salmon
• Once the 10 minutes are up, flip the fillets over (I find it easier to do this using silicone tongs). Continue cooking for a further 10 minutes
• Slice the red pepper and fresh chilli, then add to the pot along with freshly ground pepper
• Mix in gently, taking care not to break up the fish. Cook for another 4 minutes, then take the dish off the hob
• Serve hot with plain rice or polao

Additional Information

This dish tastes a little bit like a British curry house dish - probably because curry house dishes depend on similar spices and onions as a base. The red pepper here is definitely optional, I only add it when I want a little more veg in my diet. 

Review: Dhaka Biriyani

The Best Biriyani in East London

Dhaka Biryani on Mile End Road
(Yes, it seems we disagree over the
spelling of biriyani)

Dhaka Biryani is right on Mile End road, and the name makes it hard to miss if you're Bangladeshi. I've walked past several times while promising myself that I'll visit, and spending the day with friends in East London last weekend provided the perfect excuse. This review will be short and sweet, much like the others that I've done for Bangladeshi eateries in London. And just like these other places, Dhaka Biryani is a casual venue, serving up food from a counter with some basic chairs and tables laid out over a small space. In fact, despite the smart facade Dhaka Biryani is probably the most basic of the Bangladeshi places I've been to, including the shop-cum-eatery Amar Gaon. But like Amar Gaon, I'd encourage you not be deceived by looks, as the food here is excellent.

Review: Town Mill Bakery

The Virtues of Fresh Ingredients

On top: an egg and bacon sandwich, served with ketchup
Below: my egg-in-a-basket served with roast tomato and onion relish

I expected seafood to be the culinary highlight of my time in Dorset, but here I am writing about a bakery. The food here was so good that we came back for breakfast twice while in Lyme Regis, and my partner bought a loaf of bread to take home as well. That's definitely unusual, especially for me, as I'm always gunning to try new places no matter how much I may have enjoyed a meal somewhere. 

Another Weekday Dinner

শাক দিয়ে চিংড়ি
Spinach with Prawns

Spinach with prawns, served on a bed of boiled rice

It takes 10 minutes for rice to cook in the microwave, and another 2 minutes for it to cool down. That gives me 12 minutes to whip up a main dish - not quite enough time for anything traditionally Bangladeshi. But if you’re happy to spend just a little bit longer in the kitchen, this spinach and prawn combo will be done in around half an hour. Think 5 minutes of ingredient prep, 10 minutes to temper spices, and another 15 minutes to finish off the cooking process. The amounts below make a generous portion for one, or a side dish for two. It's an easy weeknight venture, making some allowances for the ingredients of course. I'm assuming a kitchen stocked with readymade garlic and ginger pastes, and prawns bought peeled and cleaned from a supermarket. 

It’s very common in Bangladesh for leaves to be cooked with freshwater prawns or the discarded bony parts of fish. The prawns or fish are meant to liven up a purely vegetarian dish, but traditionally they were never the main attraction. As people’s purchasing power has increased, this has changed, and growing up I looked forward to these more as seafood dishes. Across the extended family our parents upped the prawn content considerably, all to get the kids to eat their greens. The spices add a bit of heat to the dish, and the cooking time does mean that both the prawns and spinach are on the stove longer than is strictly necessary. But that’s the idea of the dish - mushy, soupy leaves studded with spiced prawns for a bit of bite. 

Ingredients:

• 1.00 medium onion
• 0.75 teaspoons of garlic paste
• 0.75 teaspoons of ginger paste
• 0.75 teaspoons of powdered turmeric
• 150.00 g of fresh prawns, cooked or uncooked, peeled and cleaned
• 200.00 g of spinach
• Salt, to taste (if using)

Method:

• Put a large frying pan on the stove. Add a tablespoon of oil, and leave to heat
• Finely chop the onion, and add to the pan
• Fry the onions until they go soft, translucent and start to brown at the edges
• While the onions are frying, boil 1.50 cups of water in the kettle
• Once the onions are slightly browned, add the garlic and ginger pastes to the pan. Add a splash of boiled water, and stir everything together
• Add the powdered turmeric, mix in and cook for 10 minutes. If the water starts to dry up add some more, making sure that the onions stay wet enough to form a sauce

The cooked prawns just after they
went into the pan with the onions.
Try and maintain this level of liquid
throughout the cooking process by adding hot
or boiling water as necessary

• Add the prawns - cooked or uncooked will make no difference since raw prawns will cook quickly
• Mix the prawns into the onion based sauce and leave to cook for 10 minutes, again adding water as needed if the dish dries up too much
• Add salt to taste - bearing in mind cooked prawns are already salted and shouldn't need any extra
• Add the spinach, mixing it in as it wilts and reduces

The frying pan just before the cover went on

• Cover the pan and leave to cook for a final 10 to 15 minutes - the spinach should go dark green and mushy, as opposed to bright green and crunchy
• Serve hot with plain boiled rice

Additional Info:

I leave out chillies from this recipe because I enjoy the natural sweetness of the prawns. However, feel free to add either powdered chilli with your turmeric, or some dried whole chillies just before adding the prawns. You can skip the prawns entirely to make this a vegetarian dish, but I'd recommend adding 0.25 teaspoons of garlic on top for a little more flavour. This dish would normally be served as the fish and/or vegetable component of a mutli-dish meal - combine this with recipes for chicken, other meats and carbs for a dinner party. For a purely vegetarian spinach recipe, see here, and for just prawns see here. 

Dhaka-Style Biriyani

মাটোন বিরিয়ানি 

Mutton Biriyani

Biriyani served normally, i.e. not in a flour casing,
because my house isn't try-hard Indian restaurant

This is going to be one of those epic recipe posts. Not so much because I'm going to waffle, but rather because the recipe itself is so long it may as well be a novel. Biriyani I believe needs little introduction: a dish that mixes meat and rice, possibly of Persian origins, it has travelled throughout South and Southeast Asia, and most regions nowadays produce their own varieties. The recipe below is what my mom cooks at home, and is close to what I could call Dhaka-style biriyani - though it is not identical to what you'd get from traditional roadside eateries. I've been building up to this post for a while, watching people cook biriyani and even cooking it with more experienced friends whenever possible. I wanted to wait till I was a reasonably competent cook before I had a go at this myself, so that I wouldn't mess it up and could post an actually workable recipe. 

As luck would have it my mom visited me earlier this year, so the photos you see are of what we cooked together and the recipe below has been signed off by her. A few words of advice though - I used 1.50 kg of meat for 1.00 kg of rice - but be as generous (or stingy!) as you want with the meat to rice ratio. My mom wanted to go for 2.00 kg of meat to 1.00 kg of rice, but I convinced her we shouldn't be eating quite so much red meat. The liver I used is definitely optional - the only way liver ends up in Dhaka biriyani is if there isn't enough of it to make a standalone curry. But liver in biriyani is a weakness of mine, and therefore a quirk in our household. Biriyani houses in Dhaka serve each portion of the dish with potatoes, a boiled egg and a side salad - but I don't mention the egg anywhere below because I don't like eggs have a complicated relationship with eggs.

Finally, I know restaurants around the world serve various types of biriyanis with chicken, fish, vegetables etc., but those didn't really exist back home until recently. Chicken biriyani isn't a thing for example - instead we have a lighter chicken and rice combo sold by biriyani houses called morog-polao (morog meaning chicken). Similarly, we have a fish-based ilish-polao, though this is mostly cooked at home. The spice combinations for these two dishes are different from traditional Dhaka biriyani, and I'm not sure how I would go about cooking them. If you're feeling adventurous, perhaps try cooking a more heavily spiced version of my classic chicken curry into your polao - but you're on your own with that kind of experimentation (though do let me know the results!).