Grilled Salt Mackerel
Grilled Salt Mackerel
Nothing beats Fresh
Difficulty: Medium
Cooking time: 45 minutes
Serves 4
Its coming up on the time of year where the weather is heating up, fruit is ripening sweetly, and the sweet, smoky char of grilled and barbecued meats come to mind. For me, I love grilled food, and it seems to me to be the best way to highlight, rather than obscure, the best aspects of your ingredients. When the meat is good, I don’t cook it any other way. This philosophy gets reflected a lot in Japanese cooking, where the beauty of simplicity makes what might’ve seemed like mundane ingredients and items seem vibrant and beautiful. I love grilling fish, especially when we’ve caught the fish ourselves or when we can get it from a fish market that procures their catches daily, but even if you get it whole from the supermarket and clean and clean it out yourself, you can taste the difference. There’s a quality difference, at least to me, the less processing is done in a factor and the more work is put in by my own two hands. This recipe may have minimal ingredients, but the time and care put into it makes all the difference, so today, I’ll be showing you how you can clean, gut, and de-bone your own fish at home and one of my favorite ways to prepare it.
Food Dictionary:
Miso: A salty-savory fermented soybean paste commonly used in Japanese cooking.
Pin Bones: A line of tiny bones lining the side of the spinal cord of the fish, which often makes eating fresh fish difficult but we will be removing here
The Recipe:
Ingredients:
2 whole Mackerel fish, about 1 ½ Ibs (700g) each
2 Tbsp miso paste
1 ½ Tbsp honey
Coarse salt as needed
(Optional) 2 Tbsp sake, any kind
(Optional) Garnishes, such as lemon slices, grated radish, or thin slivers of green onion
The Process:
Cleaning and De-boning:
If your butcher or local-fish-person-man hasn’t already cleaned and de-boned your fillets, we can do them at home fairly easily
First, take a very sharp, small knife and make a shallow cut down the length of the fishes’ stomach from its mouth down to the back of the fish.
NOTE: Be sure not to cut too deep during this, bursting the inside organs can spill blood and other harmful things into the meat of your fish, but if it happens, cut out the insides and rinse thoroughly
Carefully scoop out the inside, pulling gently or making light slices along the membrane of the stomach to help it get out, and being careful to not break the organs
Take a clean spoon and scrape along the walls of the stomach, peeling away the black lining on the insides and discarding.
Once removed, you can optionally cut off the head but working a large, heavy knife under the head plate and pounding down to break it at the spine
If you want to keep the head for presentation, you can even keep the bones in and skip the next step but most people don’t like eating around the little inconveniences.
Now you have a few options to de-bone it, as you can either halve it or try and keep it relatively intact. This will likely not remove 100% of the bones unless you’re very careful, however, but the reward is well worth it
If you have a boba straw or another large diameter plastic straw, you can actually stab the sharp end into the exposed spine from the decapitated end of the fish. Work it all the way down the spine, cutting it away from the flesh essentially, and cut the tail away from the fish and cleanly pull out the whole spine. This doesn’t take out the pin bones but hey its fun and satisfying to see. You can then lay the whole thing out flat and basically keep both sides of the fish as one massive fillet. Refer to method 2 for removing pin bones
You can also cut the head off of the fish and from the decapitated end, you can make a long cut parallel down each side of the spine with a long, sharp knife, being sure to keep as much of the stomach and back meat in the fillets. You should be left with a cleanly barren spine
To remove the pin bones, identify the slightly cracked looking line running down the middle of the length of the fillets where tiny bones are protruding. Take a clean needle-nose pair of pliers (preferably the slightly hooked types that fishermen use) and gently pull out the pin bones, a few at the time. Do the same with the longer bones embedded into the stomach of the fish.
From now, you can just cut out the fins and use your pliers to pull out the embedded fin bones from the meat, and it should come cleanly out. You now have a cleaned, and (potentially) de-boned mackerel fillet.
Seasoning and marinating:
About 20 minutes before you begin grilling, cut shallow lines across the skin of the mackerel
This helps adjust for shrinking of the skin during cooking and helps the salt penetrate better
Salt both sides of the fish very lightly, and brush down the fillets on both sides with sake
If you’re using a whole fish with the spine in,, just get the salt into the inside cavity of the fish and salt the outside.
This is also around the time you start your other dishes up
Mix your honey and miso paste into a small bowl, and get your broiler started on a medium heat. I’m using 500 Fahrenheit or 260 Celsius, but ovens vary wildly. You don’t want this too hot or the marinade will burn.
Alternatively, you can preheat a grill to its highest setting, but be sure to not use the searing burner if you have it, as it is way too hot in most grills to use for this fish. If you do this, make sure to use clean, well oiled grates or even a grilling basket as a stuck fish on a grill is very hard to get off intact.
Line a thick baking sheet with foil and brush down the surface lightly with oil to help keep it from sticking.
Pat your fish dry and lay the fillets skin side down. Brush the meat down with the miso mix, just lightly to get a bit of seasoning on.
Place the whole thing under the broiler on the second or third highest rack, adjusting to get more or less browning, for about 3-4 minutes
The fillets can have a couple small blackened spots, but it shouldn’t be burning. If it does, turn down the broiler or move the tray down a level.
Turn the tray 180 degrees about halfway through to ensure even heat, and every minute or so, move the fillets around. If the tray gets too hot the fillets can stick to it, which can hurt the presentation of your final product
Flip the fillets over, and soak up any accumulated juices with a paper towel and discard. Broil the skin side up as before, stopping when there’s only a few small blackened spots or when the fish registers about 130
The fish will typically register even higher than this, and depending on your thermometer, your fish, your oven, your region and probably your zodiac sign, it can reach higher or lower. Its up to your own experience to know when to take it out at your preferred doneness, and this is what makes this dish great to develop an instinct for cooking.
Remove from the broiler and place onto plates with optionally, some nicely cut lemon slices, grated daikon, or some good friends if you can afford it. Enjoy with steamed white rice or some simply grilled vegetables
