Cou-cou and Flying Fish

As tradition built it

Cou-cou and Flying Fish

Barbados's national dish, traditionally eaten on Fridays

Ingredients

• 6, sliced thinly okra
• 2 large cloves, minced garlic
• 1 medium, chopped onion
• 1 tbsp, minced thyme
• 1 tsp salt
• to cover water, for sauteing and simmering the okra base
• 2 cups cornmeal
• 1½ cups water, for soaking the cornmeal
• to serve flying fish, fried or steamed
• as available pork chops or liver, substituted for the fish in some households

Method

1. Sauté the okra, garlic and onion for seven to nine minutes.
2. Add thyme, salt and water and simmer a further two to three minutes, then strain, reserving the liquid.
3. Soak the cornmeal in roughly one and a half cups of water for fifteen minutes to an hour.
4. Simmer the cornmeal with the reserved liquid, work the okra back in, and stir continuously, traditionally with a dedicated wooden stick, until it pulls cleanly from the sides of the pot.
5. Serve, traditionally on a Friday, with flying fish fried or steamed, or with pork chops or liver in households that substitute them.

Notes

Filleting technique genuinely varies by coast, back-filleted on the west coast, front-filleted elsewhere. A 2013 academic survey of Barbadian home cooks found only forty nine per cent still held the traditional filleting skill, falling to seventeen per cent among younger respondents.

What a modern chef changes

Concentrated Mucilage, Two-Texture Finish

Rung 01

Method

1. Substitute sea bass for flying fish where the latter cannot be sourced, named honestly rather than presented as the traditional fish.
2. Cook the fish fillets sous vide to a precise, still translucent doneness, then finish with a hard sear on a Big Green Egg run very hot on direct heat, closer to the fast open-fire cooking flying fish would traditionally have had.
3. Dehydrate a portion of the okra before it goes into the pot, then rehydrate it briefly in the reserved cooking liquid, concentrating its mucilage rather than diluting it.
4. Pass the finished cou-cou briefly through a chinois for a version with none of the fibrous okra skin the traditional pot leaves behind, keeping a second, unpassed batch for texture and comparison.