West Africa · Volume 05, The Sahel Interior
Capitaine grillé
Mali, Mopti and Bamako
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- Researched from 106 sources in the brief
Capitaine is Lates niloticus, the great fish of the Niger, sold whole at Mopti and Bamako and grilled over charcoal with a green marinade packed into diagonal scores. I am going to be blunt about the sourcing, because the alternative is to launder it. The marinade, the resting time, the distance from the fire and the timings below come from a recipe aggregator with the tone of generated content. These are not authenticated numbers and I will not print them as though they were. What is not in doubt is the fish, the river, the charcoal, the scoring and the separate sauce served alongside.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. 1 hour marinating, about 15 minutes over the fire.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg whole capitaine, or sea bass, bream or thick grey mullet
- 30 g fresh ginger
- 4 garlic cloves
- 1 scotch bonnet
- 4 spring onions
- small bunch small bunch parsley
- 1 lemon, juice and zest
- 1 tbsp soumbala, crushed
- 3 tbsp groundnut oil
- to taste salt and pepper
Method
- Gut and scale the fish. Score it diagonally to the bone, three or four cuts a side.
- Blend the ginger, garlic, chilli, spring onion, parsley, lemon, soumbala, oil, salt and pepper to a rough green paste.
- Pack the paste into the scores and the cavity, not just onto the skin. Rest about 1 hour.
- Grill over charcoal, roughly 10 to 15 cm from the fire, about 6 to 7 minutes a side, turned once, to a dark crackling skin.
- Serve with a separate onion and tomato sauce, and rice.
Notes
With the caveat above standing over every number in it.
What a modern chef changes
A temperature instead of a clock, dried skin, and the sauce built on the fish
Rungs 6, 3 and 1
Method
- Stop cooking to a clock you cannot trust and cook to a probe. Off at 50°C at the thickest part of the shoulder, rested five minutes, carrying to about 55°C. That number holds regardless of whose recipe you started from, and it is the honest fix for a sourcing problem.
- Dry the skin before it goes near the fire. An hour uncovered in the fridge after the paste goes into the scores. Wet skin steams, sticks and tears; dry skin blisters and lifts.
- Leave the lemon out of the marinade if you want the herbs green. An hour of acid on parsley and spring onion is Rung 3's chlorophyll chemistry running the wrong way. Blend without acid and stir the lemon into the accompanying sauce, where the eater controls it.