North Africa · Volume 15, Harissa and the Ottoman Line
Couscous au poisson sfaxien
Sfax, Tunisia
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Researched
- Researched from 123 sources in the brief
Couscous was inscribed by UNESCO in 2020, jointly by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. This chapter does not relitigate ownership, and the joint filing is a better story than any ownership claim: Morocco and Algeria, whose land border has been closed since 1994, filed together. Cook the Sfax version, because its central decision is subtractive. The vegetables are deliberately minimal, so that the perfume of the fish diffuses into the grain. That is the clearest demonstration anywhere of what Rung 1 means.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. About 1 hour 30.
Ingredients
- 1 kg grouper, sea bass or dorade
- 1 tsp cumin; ¼ tsp turmeric; 1 tsp ground red pepper; 1 tsp salt; ¼ tsp pepper cumin, turmeric, ground red pepper, salt, pepper, mixed with olive oil into a rub
- 4 sweet peppers, and 4 hot peppers
- 4 white onions
- 1; 1½ tbsp fresh tomatoes peeled and deseeded, plus tomato concentrate
- a handful chickpeas, soaked overnight
- 1 kg couscous; olive oil, salt
Method
- Make the rub. Cut small incisions into each side of the fish and push the seasoning into them. Colour the fish in a pan and set aside.
- Sauté the sweet and hot peppers in olive oil 10 minutes and reserve.
- Build the sauce in the base of the couscoussier: onions, tomato, concentrate and the soaked chickpeas, seasoned, and set to simmer.
- Moisten the couscous with salted warm water and olive oil and loosen with a fork until every granule is separate.
- Set the grain over the sauce. Once steam breaks through, aerate with a wooden spoon. Steam 10 minutes.
- Turn out, refresh with water and oil, rub through, and steam again.
- Return the fish and peppers to the sauce to finish. Ladle sauce over the grain, mix thoroughly, and rest 5 minutes.
Notes
Why the incisions. Fish flesh is too fine-grained to take a surface rub. Slashing gets the paste to the bone line, and it stops the skin curling as the protein tightens.
What a modern chef changes
Three steams with the joint sealed, the fish pulled to temperature, and the rub bloomed
Rungs 1, 2 and 6
Method
- Go to three steams and seal the joint. Rung 1. First steam with a quarter cup of oil and a cup of water per kilo; second with two cups in two increments plus two teaspoons of salt; third with up to three cups, or broth from below. About 20 minutes each, with one to two minutes of hand-rubbing between. And seal the joint between pot and basket with flour-and-water paste: that seal is the difference between the grain being cooked by the sauce and cooked next to it.
- Pull the fish at 50°C and return it at the end. Returning whole fish to a simmering sauce works when it is eaten straight from the pot and not when it is held. Fish protein at 60°C and above expels water and turns fibrous, and no sauce puts that moisture back.
- Bloom the rub, and rest the grain properly. Rungs 2 and 6. Warm the cumin, turmeric and red pepper in the oil for a minute before mixing the paste. Then give the finished grain ten covered minutes off the heat rather than five, so the sauce distributes by capillarity instead of sitting on top.