Ceviche chileno

As tradition built it

Cure 12 hours, though some lower-quality recipes give as little as 30 minutes.

Ingredients

• 500g firm white fish: corvina, reineta or róbalo, diced small, about 1cm
• juice of about 3 limes fresh lime juice, to cover
• 1/2 onion, finely diced onion, finely diced, ordinary yellow or white rather than Peruvian red
• 1/4 each of red and green bell pepper, finely diced red and green pepper
• 1/4 cup leaves, no stems cilantro
• juice of 1/2 lime a final splash of lime
• 2 tbsp a little oil
• to taste salt
• to taste pepper
• to taste, optional merkén, in some modern versions

Method

1. Dice the firm white fish small, about a centimetre, and cover with fresh lime juice to cure, twelve hours by a named in-tradition source, though other, lower-quality recipes give as little as thirty minutes.
2. Combine after curing with the finely diced onion, red and green pepper, cilantro, a final splash of lime, a little oil, salt, pepper and, in some modern versions, merkén.
3. Keep it deliberately minimal: no sweet potato, no corn, the two additions that mark the Peruvian dish out from this one.

What a modern chef changes

A vacuum-marinated cure, offered to test rather than settled, and a dust of dehydrated ají

Method

1. Consider a controlled, timed sous vide-style vacuum marination at fridge temperature, which could in principle cure the fish more evenly through the whole cut than simple submersion, avoiding the over-cured rim and raw core a long soak in an open dish can leave; this is this chapter's own reasonable extrapolation from general technique, not documented Chilean chef practice, and should be tried and judged on its own merits rather than taken as settled.
2. Dehydrate a portion of the dressing's ají into a fine dust in the spice grinder, and dust it over at the very end for heat without diluting the citrus.