Freaking Jerk ass Fish!!

[FCD]

Had some blow your doors off fish and chips last night, tempura and all, but also had quite a bit of fish left over.  What to do?

Freaking Jerk people!  No, we actually made a derivative of Jerked fish, complete with Scotch Bonnet peppers!  The recipe is actually called "Escovitch Fish".  Here's the basic idea...

(Based on 2 lbs of fish, you can adjust accordingly)

salt and pepper to taste (or seasoning of choice)
▢ 1 lime or lemon
▢ ½ cup (120ml) vegetable oil (more as needed)
▢ 1 bay leaf
▢ 1 teaspoon (about 2 cloves)
▢ ½ teaspoon ginger
▢ 1 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced
▢ 1 medium carrot, julienned
▢ ½ red bell pepper, thinly sliced
▢ ½ yellow bell pepper, thinly sliced
▢ 2 sprigs thyme
▢ 1 Scotch bonnet pepper, pierced (or replace with ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper)  (note: we sliced ours and left the seeds in...for HOT)
▢ ½ teaspoon (1g) Jamaican allspice
▢ 1 tablespoon (12g) sugar
▢ 1 teaspoon (5ml) Worcestershire sauce
▢ ¾ cup (180ml) malt vinegar (can sub red wine vinegar)
▢ freshly ground white pepper

Rinse the fish and rub it down with a lemon or lime—season with salt, pepper, and preferred seasoning. I used
.
Heat oil on medium in a large skillet. As soon as it's hot, add the fish and cook for 5-7 minutes on each side until cooked through and crispy.
Remove the fish. Set it aside or place it in the oven so it stays warm until the sauce is ready. Drain the oil, leaving 2-3 tablespoons behind for the vegetables.
Add the bay leaf, garlic, and ginger. Stir-fry for about a minute, making sure the garlic doesn't burn.
Add the onion, bell peppers, carrots, thyme, scotch bonnet, sugar, Worcestershire sauce, and allspice. Continue stirring for 2-3 minutes.
Add the vinegar, mix, and adjust seasonings to your preference. Let it simmer for about 2 more minutes.
Discard the bay leaf and thyme before serving the sauce over the fish with a side of flatbread, or rolls.

OH MAN!!!  THIS is GOOD!!!

Recipe Source


Edit - Served with Mushroom rice (dried crumbled Shiitakes added, and some mushroom crystals).

[Ksihkehe]

I like jerk seasoning. I prefer chicken to fish because it tends to be so strong. I guess maybe a bit of salmon would be quite nice with a jerk glaze. I'd also probably buy sardines in jerk sauce instead of tomato or mustard if it was an option. I don't consume a ton of that, but it's a great option for intermittent fasting routines. A tin of sardines and a couple dates are a great punch of nutrients.

We're not the first stop for seafood in the supply chain so I don't do much seafood these days. We have a salmon season, but even the native sellers aren't terribly cheap. We do get decent shrimp here at really reasonable rates. Occasionally, I can get the less desirable small and broken shrimp for cheaper than ground beef. Big shrimp is good, but I actually prefer the flavor of the small ones. Seems to always be a trade-off with a lot of seafood. The larger sizes are more convenient for everything from cooking to cleaning, but the small sizes have better flavor and higher quality flesh.

I haven't had sushi in quite some time. I made a ceviche, with tilapia of all things, last year or something.

I have trouble remembering the last batch of cayenne I've had where a half teaspoon would put you anywhere near the heat of a whole scotch bonnet. I often prefer the umami of dried peppers over fresh, but I do eat a lot of fresh jalapeno and serrano peppers. I think the jerk sauce would get some of my homemade blend. Jerk seasoning isn't too far off from Thai flavors. Drop some fish sauce or paste in, pan fry some rice noodles with it, finish with chopped peanuts, mung bean sprouts, and cilantro. Rasta pad Thai.

We have the last bit of a Thai flavored chicken stew to finish off. A simple thick New England style stew of meat and potato, but the base stock was fortified with a blended curry of Braggs, fish sauce, cilantro, ginger, chilies, green onions, garlic, and a bit of anchovy paste. I hadn't fused those two favorites of mine before and I was very pleased with the results. I use sour cream to finish most of my stews and a lot of my sauces and in this case it replaced the role of coconut milk really well.

I'm at hour 16 of todays fast and I've got another hour to go before I break it. I'm glad you didn't post this 6 hours ago because I'm ready to eat.

[FCD]

...I made a ceviche, with tilapia of all things, ...

Tilapia???  Whoa, I think there would be a few fish I'd pick for ceviche over tilapia, but that's just me.  But honestly, I'm not a huge ceviche fan in general.  I love the flavors, but I can't really eat much of it at all. My teeth, or some reason, can't take a lot of lime juice, especially fresh lime juice, and lemon doesn't cook the same way, so I'm kind of leary about ceviche.

When I was working down in Peru they serve a lot of ceviche down there.  In fact, it's actually hard to find cooked fish in Lima, where I was.  They use the ceviche cooking method for everything it seems, fish, shellfish, crustaceans, freaking reptiles, you name it.  Kinda' spooked me out a little bit.  Squid is king down there.  Just off the Lima coast they have the "Humbolt Current" which is this huge up-welling of of deep ocean water from the Southern Ocean, and they have like metric tons of squid every day. 

I will say one thing about Peru, at least where I stayed.  They have some of the best beef I've ever tasted (and I raise beef cattle)!!  I think they bring it in from Argentina, and man, is it GOOD!  Most flavorful beef I've ever eaten...by far. 

Anyway, the jerked fish was excellent (even though it wasn't called that).  If I were to change anything in the recipe, I'd only cut back on the green and red peppers (not the Scotch Bonnets/Habeneros).  Sometimes sweet green/red pepper can dominate the flavor of a dish.

[Ksihkehe]

Tilapia???  Whoa, I think there would be a few fish I'd pick for ceviche over tilapia, but that's just me.

I didn't pick tilapia, it was just what I had. It's mild and has a good texture so I did make the choice on how to prepare it. The list of fish I would pick to be below tilapia would be much shorter than the list of what I'd pick above it. The only thing that elevates it from the real bottom of the barrel is that it doesn't have a fishy note and it has nice texture. A lot of the other bottom tier white fish have horrible texture and/or no flavor at all. I think whiting, scrod, and maybe hake all fall into that bottom tier category. Scrod? I think scrod was one of them that I first had in the past few years.

I don't remember specifically, but I suspect that I didn't have access to the stove or didn't have room for it in what I was cooking. Dunno. If I have a bag of something frozen I hate to leave just one or two things in it because they end up being not enough to make anything with. If it's not something I routinely buy to keep on hand, I'm further ahead to figure out how to use the last of it so it's not haunting my freezer for eternity. I haven't bought fish since the batch that was made out of. I probably had fried fish that night and the ceviche the next day.

[FCD]

I didn't pick tilapia, it was just what I had. It's mild and has a good texture so I did make the choice on how to prepare it. The list of fish I would pick to be below tilapia would be much shorter than the list of what I'd pick above it. The only thing that elevates it from the real bottom of the barrel is that it doesn't have a fishy note and it has nice texture. A lot of the other bottom tier white fish have horrible texture and/or no flavor at all. I think whiting, scrod, and maybe hake all fall into that bottom tier category. Scrod? I think scrod was one of them that I first had in the past few years.

I don't remember specifically, but I suspect that I didn't have access to the stove or didn't have room for it in what I was cooking. Dunno. If I have a bag of something frozen I hate to leave just one or two things in it because they end up being not enough to make anything with. If it's not something I routinely buy to keep on hand, I'm further ahead to figure out how to use the last of it so it's not haunting my freezer for eternity. I haven't bought fish since the batch that was made out of. I probably had fried fish that night and the ceviche the next day.

I apologize.  My statement probably seemed pretty insensitive; I shouldn't have phrased it that way.  I completely understand and appreciate your response.  Just to put some context to what my meaning was...tilapia is typically a farmed fish and on a large scale, and as such they often don't live in the cleanest water due to the density of farming operations.  The taste of tilapia is, in many cases, great.  So, from a taste perspective alone it would be a great fish to select.  I was only thinking that I'd want a fish like that cooked with heat.  That's all I meant.

Again, my apologies.  No offense intended at all.

[Ksihkehe]

I apologize.  My statement probably seemed pretty insensitive; I shouldn't have phrased it that way.  I completely understand and appreciate your response.  Just to put some context to what my meaning was...tilapia is typically a farmed fish and on a large scale, and as such they often don't live in the cleanest water due to the density of farming operations.  The taste of tilapia is, in many cases, great.  So, from a taste perspective alone it would be a great fish to select.  I was only thinking that I'd want a fish like that cooked with heat.  That's all I meant.

Again, my apologies.  No offense intended at all.

I got a slight chuckle that you thought that might be seen as insensitive. I actually mentioned that it was tilapia because anyone that knows about tilapia would be surprised by it. That it's got such a bad reputation was what made it notable. There is no scenario I can imagine to try it other than having fish to get rid of. I don't even remember why it was, but I remember it was not my first choice lol. I think that tilapia is better than its reputation, but in the short time I bought them I found the quality somewhat varied. I have no idea why we even gave it a try. I think it may have originally been the only frozen fish that seemed decent for frying. I remembered since that post that the last bag went into a batch of the dog's food. I think I'd prefer pollack for frozen, but pretty much all fish that comes shrink-wrapped and frozen needs to be rapidly thawed and dried properly if you want it to be palatable.

This is just life in the boonies for me. What I won't touch is the local store's "fresh" section. The fish they're selling is only 300 miles or so from the nearest ocean here in our little supermarkets, but it always looks like it fought like hell for every mile to make it to the display case. I just assume that not many people here know what fresh fish should really look like. I tried a few different types of the flash frozen, but it's just not the same as really fresh fish. My father spent a lot of his young life as a commercial fisherman and he insisted to everyone that all fish is frozen and it's all fine, but I'm fairly convinced he never ate flash frozen fish in a bag.

I took no offense. I was just clarifying that I wasn't deranged at the time I did it, lol. I actually reasoned my way to it.

The food safety and environmental science nerd assessment boiled down to tilapia being such a junk fish that most of the things that are likely to be the highest risk for serious exposure to really bad stuff might not actually even be mitigated with heat, so I was probably getting exposed anyway if they were present. I don't know if any of those toxins associated with filthy water break down under even very high heat. The parasites are mitigated by the extended deep freeze. The remaining controllable risk was bacteria which could be mitigated with acid.

I've probably consumed much worse without even knowing it. It was a one time risk though and I have 24/7 access to a convenient bathroom. I take risks now that I wouldn't when working on the move, lol. If anyone is opening a tilapia ceviche stand, I will not be a customer and wouldn't recommend it. For a one shot deal, I added more vinegar and called it day. 

I had a paragraph my prior reply about tilapia being a junk fish that's only popular because it can practically be raised in septic tanks, but I removed it before posting. The lagoons probably don't smell much better than septic effluent either. I cut it out as to not venture to far afield on you.

[FCD]

Sounds like you are quite a bit better informed on the subject than I.

Cheers!

Edit - FWIW, the recipe in the OP would work just fine with tilapia too! :-)