Namas

As tradition built it

Serves 10 to 15 as canapés. 30 minutes in the fridge.

Ingredients

• about 500g snapper or white fish fillet
• 120ml coconut cream
• 2 tbsp mushroom soy sauce
• 1 lime, juiced
• 1 long red chilli
• 180ml coriander, plus extra leaves to serve
• to taste salt

To serve

• 10 to 15 large corn chips, tostadas or crispbread

Method

1. Dice the chilli and coriander as finely as you can.
2. With a sharp knife, dice the raw fish into cubes of about ½cm.
3. Mix everything in a non-reactive bowl and salt to taste.
4. Leave it in the fridge 30 minutes, to cure in the citrus and coconut.
5. Spoon the fish gently onto the corn chips, top with coriander leaves, and serve at once.

Notes

The recipe is Nornie Bero's, as ABC News printed it (23 October 2018). Her book version cures sliced kingfish in lime with chilli and coriander 10 minutes before the coconut cream, dark soy and salt go in, then 15 minutes cold, with taro chips. Matilda Nona of Badu, on SBS's Strait to the Plate, uses no coconut or soy: snapper, onion, chilli, orange, lime, lemon and brown vinegar, 30 minutes and never more than 2 hours, which she traces to the Japanese divers of the pearling era.

What a modern chef changes

Citrus as the controlled cooking medium

Rung 6

Method

1. Extract a clean, pulp-free citrus juice through a chinois, controlling exactly how much acid reaches the fish rather than relying on a hand-squeezed juice's inconsistency.
2. Time the cure precisely, tasting at intervals, since citrus curing is a real cooking process with a real endpoint, not an indefinite marinade.
3. Serve immediately once cured, as tradition already does, rather than holding the dish and letting the citrus continue working past its best point.