Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 07, The Reef, the Earth Oven and the Girmit Table
Fish Suruwa
Indo-Fijian
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- 9 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
A base of onion, tomato, garlic, ginger, chilli, cumin, turmeric and garam masala simmered down, finished with coconut milk for a creamy, thinner-than-mainland-Indian gravy, served with rice or roti. Honestly flagged: every source found for this specific dish is a diaspora or Western-audience recipe adaptation rather than a confirmed in-tradition primary source, so the technique below is presented as indicative rather than an authoritative traditional method, following the same curry-building sequence documented more strongly for goat curry above.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 600 g firm white fish fillet, cut into large pieces
- 2 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 onion, finely diced
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 3cm piece fresh ginger, grated
- 1 tomato, diced
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp turmeric
- 1 tsp garam masala
- to taste chilli to taste
- 200 ml coconut milk
- to taste salt
Method
- Sweat the onion in the oil until soft and starting to colour.
- Add the garlic and ginger, cook briefly, then the ground cumin, turmeric, garam masala and chilli, cooking them into the fat for a minute or two.
- Add the tomato, cook down to a paste-like base.
- Add the coconut milk and bring to a gentle simmer.
- Add the fish, and poach gently, 8 to 10 minutes, until just cooked through, taking care not to break the fish up by stirring too hard.
- Season with salt and serve with rice or roti.
What a modern chef changes
The base built to the full curry sequence described in Rung 4, and the fish protected from the pot's own heat
Rung 4
Method
- Build the full sequence, whole spice bloomed first, onion properly coloured, garlic and ginger next, ground spice cooked into the fat before any liquid goes in, tomato added partway through, rather than the shortcut, everything-in-one-pan version many diaspora recipe adaptations default to.
- Cook the fish separately, sous vide at 52°C for 15 minutes, or very gently poached off to the side, and add it to the finished sauce only at the point of plating. Fish suruwa's gravy needs real simmering time to develop; the fish itself does not, and cooking them together for the sauce's sake routinely overcooks the fish.
- Reduce the base further than instinct suggests, if any of it is destined for a roti parcel rather than rice, per Rung 6, until the oil separates and the spice coats visibly, so the same pot can honestly serve both a rice plate and a wrapped parcel from two different reductions of the same base.