TacoCat (kinda) Cooks! #46: Trying Sutchi Fish Curry! 🐟
Hey Steemit!
We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Both because it's cheaper and also healthier to cook for yourself compared to eating out. While I usually stick to the usual recipes I do like to try new ones once in a while and figured I'd share the new ones I've tried.
The other day I saw a really good deal for frozen fish at the supermarket then I remembered we still had some packets of curry sauce in our pantry that I've been meaning to use. Thankfully they're all packaged so they do last a while and hadn't expired yet. We had both chicken and fish curry sauces but since I've never tried cooking fish curry and never cooked frozen fish before, I thought this was a good opportunity to try something new!
These are the ingredients in the pack and it also comes with a suggested recipe and cooking instructions which are really helpful.
I didn't follow the recipe exactly but used these ingredients instead:
- 2 sutchi fish fillets
- lady fingers
- half big onion
- light coconut milk
- Singlong fish curry sauce
Step 1: Defrost the fish fillets. If you use fresh fish you wouldn't need this step of course. I read online that the proper way to defrost fish is to wrap it in a sealed plastic bag and submerge it under cold tap water. They key thing is to not use heat to defrost the fish since big temperature differences will compromise the texture, flavour and level of undesirable bacteria on seafood.
I was concerned about letting water get in since I couldn't wrap the fish tightly enough in the cling wrap but I figured it would be fine.
Step 2: While the fish is defrosting, chop the vegetables.
I just cut the onion and lady fingers into smaller pieces since they were going into the curry I didn't want them to get lost by being too fine.
Step 3: Once the fish fillet is thawed, slice it into smaller bite-sized pieces.
Truth be told, I didn't even know what a sutchi fish was until I looked it up. Apparently it is a a white-fleshed freshwater fish with a moist and firm texture. Its neutral taste allows it to easily take on the flavor of other ingredients, which I thought made it perfect for curry.
There was an article I saw that detailed a concern regarding the method of sutchi processing though.
Most of the frozen sutchi fish that is available today have a huge percentage of glazing and many unscrupulous producers have been known to add chemicals to enable them to do double glazing. Thus, when the frozen fish fillet is thawed, the customer actually gets 30-50 % less meat than what they paid for. Sometimes, this is also used to cover up the “less than fresh” fish fillets particularly in the low seasons of the fish.
Source: highseashealthyfood
I figured this was probably at least partially true but since I was just using the fish to make curry it didn't really matter how "less than fresh" it was.
Anyway, I cut the fillets up into smaller pieces and boiled some water in a pot.
Step 4: Add the curry sauce pack into about 250g of water (as per instructions) and bring to a boil.
Step 5: Add in vegetables and fish, mix and stir well on low-medium heat and let is simmer until the meat is cooked.
Step 6: The recipe said to add coconut milk and tamarind juice which I didn't have so I added about half of the pack of coconut milk which is about 100g.
After mixing in the coconut milk and letting it simmer, the fish curry was ready!
It's time to serve! I also made my standard vegetable rice to go with it. I didn't want anything too flavourful since most of the flavour was going to come from the curry anyway. It looked and smelled so good!
I made my rice with carrots, mushrooms and leftover spinach stems cut into small pieces. It was plain so it was perfect pairing with the curry.
The curry itself tasted pretty good! It was savoury and had just the right amount of spiciness. It didn't taste very oily either, despite how it looks. I was honestly surprised how well it turned out. The fish was cooked nicely and was soft and tender. The vegetables were maybe a little more tender than some people would like but I thought it was alright.
Overall, this was a very delicious and hearty meal; perfect to warm up on a rainy day. I was a little nervous since it was my first time cooking with frozen fish and sutchi fish in particular but I'm relieved it went off without a hitch! I'll definitely be looking to trying different brands of fish curry because there are quite a few to choose from here, but the sutchi fillet is a winning pair for sure.
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
