HOLY MACKEREL!

 They’re cheap, they’re healthful, they’re delicious. Mackerel, a fish in no danger of over-fishing, is a summertime treat. 

If mackerel has any drawback, it’s that the oil-rich flesh deteriorates rapidly. Eat them fresh, fried, baked or grilled. For longer keeping, put them in escabeche, a vinegar marinade. 

Fillets of mackerel in escabeche center a salad platter, a perfect summer lunch.

Escabeche is an ancient way of preserving foods in a marinade. (The word derives, via Arabic, from the Persian sikbâg.) Typically, escabeche is made with vinegar, olive oil and salt, often with aromatics such as garlic and herbs. Vinegar is a potent preservative. Olive oil in the marinade rises to the top as the food cools and creates a protective seal, allowing the escabeche foods to be kept for periods of time without refrigeration.  

Mackerel in escabeche is particularly popular in Cádiz, Málaga and Huelva (Andalusia) where this fish is common. In Galicia, simple escabeche, with vinegar, garlic and pimentón (paprika) is used for sardines, shad and lamprey as well as mussels and oysters. In inland regions such as La Mancha, escabeche is a traditional way of preserving fresh-water fish such as trout, pike and tench. If you haven’t got mackerel, sardines or trout, try this with farmed catfish. 

Traditionally, the fish is gutted, floured and fried until thoroughly cooked. Then boiling hot escabeche marinade is poured over the pieces of fish. Easier, skip the frying and cook the fish right in the marinade.

You can make this dish with whole (gutted) fish or fillets. Even when the spine has been removed, mackerel has fine bones that are much easier to pull out after the fish is cooked. 

For presentation, try to keep the fillets intact—but save any chunks that break up, as they are terrific mashed up with hard-cooked egg and mayonnaise for “tuna” salad sandwich.

How to serve escabeche? As a cold dish garnished with leafy greens and tomatoes, it makes a good starter or luncheon entrée. Those crunchy pickled carrots in the marinade are delicious, by the way.

Serve mackerel in escabeche as a starter, garnished with pickled carrots, potatoes, eggs and greens.

Serve mackerel fillet on toasts and garnish with strips of red pepper from the marinade.

Mash the mackerel up with chopped carrots, red peppers, hard-cooked egg and a little mayo. Use it as a sandwich spread or topping for toasts.

Salad with mackerel and vegetables makes a main course dish.

Mackerel in Escabeche Marinade

Caballa en Escabeche

Serves 6.

Mackerel.

3-4 whole mackerel, 2 ½-3 pounds

Salt

¾ cup extra virgin olive oil

1 onion, julienne sliced

2 carrots, sliced

½ cup julienned red bell pepper

6 cloves garlic, slivered

Red pepper flakes (optional)

2 bay leaves

Sprig of lemon thyme (optional)

Strip of orange or lemon zest

¼ teaspoon black peppercorns

¼ teaspoon coriander seed

Pinch of ground cloves

½ cup white wine

¾ cup white wine vinegar

¼ cup water

Cooked potato, sliced, to serve (optional)

Leafy greens, to serve (optional)

Hard-cooked eggs, to serve (optional)

Flaky salt

Use paper towels to wipe out any remaining blood in the cavity of the fish. Wash the mackerel well and pat them dry. Sprinkle them inside and out with salt.

Heat ½ cup of the oil in a pan large enough to hold the fish. Add the onion, carrots, red pepper and garlic. Poach them in the oil until somewhat softened, 5 minutes. Add the red pepper flakes, if using; the bay leaves; thyme, if using; lemon zest; peppercorns; coriander; cloves; wine; vinegar; water, and 1 teaspoon salt. Cover the pan and cook the vegetables 10 minutes.

Carefully place the fish in the pan. Raise the heat so the liquid bubbles gently. Cover the pan and cook the fish 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the mackerel to finish cooking in the residual heat, 15 minutes. (The fish is cooked if it easily separates from the bone.)

Lift out spines.

  Use a slotted spatula to remove the mackerel to a platter. While     they are still warm, use a table knife to scrape off the skin. Split a fish open along the spine and lay it flat. Lift out and discard the spine. Cut each half into two fillets, carefully removing any bones. (Fingers work best for finding the bones.)

  Place the fillets in a non-reactive container (glass or ceramic). Ladle     escabeche over each layer. If fillets fall apart, layer the pieces along with the whole fillets. Pour all the remaining escabeche liquid over the mackerel. Drizzle 2 tablespoons of remaining olive oil over the top.

Layer mackerel with marinade.

Cover tightly with a lid or a triple layer of plastic wrap. Refrigerate at least 8 hours and up to 36 hours. 

To serve, lift fillets of mackerel out of the marinade and place them on plates with leafy greens. Garnish with strips of red pepper and sliced carrots from the escabeche plus sliced potatoes and eggs, if using. Spoon escabeche marinade over the mackerel and potatoes. Sprinkle with flaky salt and drizzle with remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil.

Escabeche plated.

More escabeche recipes:

Quail Lollipops in Escabeche.

Chicken Wings in Escabeche.

Anchovies in Bitter Orange Escabeche.

Pickled Mushrooms.

Quinoa Salad with Partridge in Escabeche.

Marinated Bonito with Olives.

More recipes with mackerel:

Mackerel with Pisto Vegetables.

Horse Mackerel Biscay Style.

FISH ON FRIDAYS

I usually eat fish on Fridays, not for any religious reasons, but because it’s the day of the week with the biggest selection of seafood at the market. Now, with the beginning of Lent, the period leading up to Easter when many Catholics observe days of vigilia, or abstinence from eating meat, the fish markets are really sensational.

 

Colorful wrasse, something different at the fish market. This one has been gutted and scales removed.

The season brings a bigger variety of fish than usual, including some fish that I don’t find the rest of the year. So, it seems like the right time to sample seafood that I don’t usually cook.

This week it’s a wrasse. A beautiful reddish-orange fish, weighing almost 1 ¾ pounds. The market name in Spanish was bodión. But a search through my fish books—Alan Davidson’s The Tio Pepe Guide to the Seafood of Spain and Portugal (Santana Books); Seafood, A Connoisseur’s Guide and Cookbook, by Alan Davidson with watercolors of fish by Charlotte Knox (Mitchell Beazley), and Manual del Pescado by José Carlos Capel (R&B Ediciones)—led me to decide my fish was probably a (female) cuckoo wrasse or else a ballan wrasse, neither of which is a threatened species. (Check out threatened species at http://www.iucnredlist.org.)

While wrasse is not precisely a “trash” fish, neither is it commonly marketed. Because it’s not an A-list fish such as bass, sole, hake, its price is lower.

I found the wrasse to be “really good,” though not quite “excellent.” The flesh is white, lean and bland in taste; the texture is firm-flaky, like other rock fish; bones not unlike those of sea bass, which is to say, quite acceptable. Small wrasse are best in soups and seafood stews. (A good soup to try is cachorreñas, made with sour Sevilla oranges, recipe ) But my catch was definitely large enough to consider other ways of cooking.

Fish is baked with a spicy chermoula sauce and strips of preserved lemon.

I picked a Canary Islands recipe for baked fish, planning to serve it with spicy mojo verde sauce, made with green chile and cilantro (recipe here ). Then I happened upon a similar recipe for Moroccan fish tagine in Paula Wolfert’s Moroccan Cuisine (originally published as Cous Cous and Other Good Food from Morocco  in 1973). The fish is baked in the oven with chermoula sauce/marinade and preserved lemons. Chermoula is almost identical to mojo (after all, the Canary Islands are closer to Morocco than to mainland Spain). Plus, I just happened to have some preserved lemons waiting for just such an occasion.

Preserved lemon.

Salty preserved lemons are a Moroccan condiment. You can buy them at specialty food shops. I get the lemons at a local market that has several Moroccan butchers and food shops catering to the large Moroccan population in southern Spain. 

The sauce keeps the fish moist as it bakes and the lemons punch up the flavor a lot. Good way to go if a wrasse comes your way, but you could try it with sea bass or similar fish.

I like cooking whole fish. Leaving the head on helps keep the fish moist. And, it’s easier to lift the flesh off of cooked fish than it is to fillet raw fish.

Baked Fish with Moroccan Chermoula Sauce and Preserved Lemons

1 whole fish, about 2 pounds
Salt
½ cup cilantro (fresh coriander leaves)
½ cup parsley + 1 tablespoon
3 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon pimentón (paprika)
Few threads of saffron, crushed (optional)
Cayenne, to taste
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 fennel bulb
½ preserved lemon
1 cup fresh or canned chopped tomatoes


Sprinkle the fish inside and out with salt. Cut 3 or 4 deep slashes in the fish, on both sides.

To make the chermoula, combine in a blender the cilantro, parsley, garlic, cumin, pimentón, saffron, cayenne, olive oil, lemon juice and ½  teaspoon salt . Blend to make a smooth sauce.

Spread the sauce on both sides of the fish and inside its cavity. Allow to stand at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Fish ready for baking.

Preheat oven to 375ºF.

Cut the fennel in half, then cut it lengthwise into strips. Arrange them in the bottom of a baking dish large enough to hold the fish. Place the fish on top. Cut the preserved lemon rind into strips, discarding the flesh. Insert strips in the slashes in the fish’s flesh. Scatter the remainder around the fish. Spoon over the tomatoes and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley.

Cover the baking dish with foil and bake the fish until it flakes and easily pulls away from the bones, about 45 minutes.

Sauce keeps fish moist while it bakes.

SOMETHING'S FISHY

Bonito, a great fish.

I think I’ve finally got all my ducks in a row. Or, fish, actually.

Last month when I was in Sevilla for a few days, I encountered tapas of a fish called melva. I found melva in the fish market there too, but I’ve never seen it in my local market. Melva somewhat resembles bonito, a fresh fish that I buy frequently. But, is that the same as bonito del norte, the canned fish that I buy regularly for “tuna salad”?

I pulled out my fishy reference books—Alan Davidson’s The Tio Pepe Guide to the Seafood of Spain and Portugal (Santana Books); Seafood, A Connoisseur’s Guide and Cookbook, by Alan Davidson with sensational watercolors of fish by Charlotte Knox (Mitchell Beazley), and Manual del Pescado by José Carlos Capel (R&B Ediciones).  The Alan Davidson books are really helpful because they give fish names in several languages, including regional variations in nomenclature.

I also consulted http://www.fishbase.org, an amazing on-line data-base of fish worldwide and their names—and variations—in many languages. (That was where I found out that “rosada,” a widely marketed fish in Spain, is the “pink cusk-eel” and comes from the south Atlantic. When a market fish vendor tries to tell me it’s “fresh,” I know better, as it is always frozen, then thawed.)

Here’s the ducky list.

Melva is Auxis rochei, the frigate mackerel (although not actually a mackerel). According to Davidson, it is abundant in the Bay of Cádiz—which explains why it’s so ubiquitous in Sevilla.

Bonito is Sarda sarda (note—not tuna), known in English as bonito or Atlantic bonito. In Japan, bonito is an important ingredient in the cuisine. In Spain, this is an excellent blue fish, very meaty, fairly economical.

Bonito del norte is Thunnus alalunga, albacore tuna or long-finned tuna. In Spain, it’s known as atún blanco, white tuna (to differentiate it from “red tuna,” blue-finned tuna). In summer, albacore is fished off the northern Cantabrian coast. Much of it goes to the canning industry, but, fresh, it is used in the wonderful Basque dish, marmitako, tuna with potatoes.

As I’ve said before: Love the fish you’re with! I’ve got me a pretty bonito (no, I did not find out why bonito—which means “pretty”—is called bonito). Note the dark longitudinal stripes.

While flipping through the pages of Capel’s fish manual, I came across a fine recipe for bonito, calling for olives. As you may remember from last week, I’m on an olive roll, so this suited me just fine.

Bonito and its “blue” relatives, such as mackerel, sardines and tuna, are often prepared in escabeche, a vinegar marinade for cooked fish. This recipe is reversed—more like an adobo, as it is marinated—but only briefly—before cooking. The marinade is reduced to make the sauce.

(This recipe is adapted from one published in Manual del Pescado, by José Carlos Capel and attributed to La Cocina Andaluza by Miguel Salcedo Hierro).

Fillets of bonito with olive sauce.

Bonito Fresco con Aceitunas
Marinated Bonito with Olives

Serves 4 as a starter or 2 as a main dish.

1 whole bonito, about 2 pounds
½ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
½ cup white wine
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
2 cloves garlic, slivered
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
Sprigs of thyme
Fennel flowers (optional)
½ cup water
1 cup pitted Manzanilla olives, sliced
Flour, for dredging
Olive oil, for frying

Cut off and discard head and guts. Cut the flesh into four fillets, leaving the skin on. (Besides the center spine, the bonito has a row of bones running down the middle of each half.)

Fish fillets in marinade.

 Place the fillets in a single layer in a non-reactive bowl (glass or earthenware). Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Add the oil, wine, vinegar, garlic, bay leaf, parsley, thyme and fennel, if using. Cover and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours.

Remove the fillets from the marinade. Place the marinade in a small saucepan with the water. Bring to a boil, then simmer until reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Strain the liquid and discard the garlic and herbs. Return the liquid to the pan and add the olives. Simmer gently.

Dredge the bonito fillets in flour and fry in hot oil until golden on both sides. Serve hot or cold with the olive sauce.

Crispy on the outside, moist fish on the inside. Olives are a piquant sauce.