Moqueca baiana

As tradition built it

Moqueca baiana

Serves 4. About 45 minutes, including 20 minutes marinating the fish.

Ingredients

• 800g (for four) firm white fish, traditionally garoupa (grouper), cut into steaks
• to taste salt
• 1, juiced lime
• 3 to 4 cloves, crushed, divided between the marinade and the layers garlic, crushed
• a thin layer dendê
• 1, sliced onion, sliced
• 1, sliced red pepper, sliced
• 1, sliced green pepper, sliced
• 3 ripe tomatoes
• 2 to 3 tbsp dendê, additional
• roughly 400ml (one can) coconut milk
• a good handful, chopped coriander, chopped, to finish

Method

1. Season the fish steaks with salt, lime and crushed garlic and leave twenty minutes.
2. In a wide, shallow pan, or a traditional clay panela de barro if you have one, put down a thin layer of dendê first.
3. Lay sliced onion, red and green pepper, tomatoes and more garlic over the dendê in unstirred layers.
4. Lay the fish on top.
5. Pour over a further two to three tablespoons of dendê and the coconut milk.
6. Cover and cook on a low-medium heat, shaken rather than stirred, for fifteen to twenty minutes, until the fish is just cooked through and the sauce has come together on its own.
7. Finish with chopped coriander.

Notes

Kept sharply distinct in Bahian usage from moqueca capixaba, the dendê-free, olive-oil-and-urucum version from Espírito Santo (AM-42): in Salvador, "moqueca" without qualification means this dish, and the capixaba version is called caldo or ensopado instead.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide doneness inside the traditional closed-vessel build

Rung 3, Rung 4

Method

1. Hold the layered, undisturbed build exactly as tradition sets it out, Rung 3, since this closed-vessel steam-poach is already doing precisely what a modern kitchen would independently arrive at for cooking fish gently and evenly; do not stir it to check on it.
2. Cook the fish itself sous vide to a precise, still-translucent-at-the-centre doneness before it ever meets the pan, then add it only in the final two minutes of the covered simmer to finish in the sauce's own steam rather than cooking through in it, a genuine improvement on doneness control the traditional method, built for a whole steak simmered from raw, was never trying to solve.
3. Finish with raw, unrefined dendê stirred through off the heat, Rung 4, rather than relying solely on what was added at the start.