Smoking, drying, marinating and grilling over coals: African cuisine has several techniques for preparing fish, each with its own gesture and, for dried or salted fish, its own precautions. Here are five tips, with the blog’s products and recipes that illustrate them.
1. Choose smoked or dried fish to flavour sauces and broths
Smoking and drying are traditional preservation techniques that give fish a firm flesh and a pronounced taste, used for a long time in West Africa to transport and preserve fish far from the coast. Rinse the fillet or the whole fish, then let it soak for a few minutes in warm water to soften it before flaking it into a leaf-based sauce, a vegetable broth or a rich rice dish at the end of cooking. Smoked catfish fillet, dried anchovy and dried and smoked shrimp are all prepared this way.
2. Desalt salted fish before cooking
Salting reduces the water content of fish to slow the growth of micro-organisms, but it leaves flesh that is often too salty to cook as is. Before cooking, soak the salted fish in water for several hours, changing the water once or twice, to reduce the salt content while rehydrating the flesh. Dried or salted fish is never eaten raw: it must always be rehydrated and then cooked through before serving.
3. Marinate with lemon and onion, the yassa way
Senegalese yassa marinade combines lemon juice and zest, mustard, garlic, peanut oil and a large quantity of sliced onions, which marinate with the fish rather than being added only during cooking. Light slashes in the flesh let the marinade penetrate; allow a minimum of two hours, more for a whole fish. The simmering time for fish in its marinade is shorter than for poultry, around twenty to twenty-five minutes. The full recipe for yassa and for grilled tilapia, marinated with garlic and lime detail the technique.
4. Braise or grill over charcoal
Braised fish is prepared on a small brazier, once the coals are covered with a thin layer of white ash. Marinated with spices, garlic, ginger and chilli, slashed to let the flavours penetrate, it cooks on the grill about fifteen centimetres from the coals, ten to fifteen minutes on each side depending on thickness, until the skin is golden and lightly crisp. This wood-fire cooking is found in several West and Central African countries, from Dakar to Douala by way of Abidjan, where it accompanies attiéké with fish.
5. Adapt the preparation to the fish you choose
Fresh fish, smoked fish and dried fish do not call for the same gesture. The first is marinated, slashed and cooked directly; the other two are rinsed and rehydrated before being flaked or cut into pieces in a sauce, as in the traditional peanut sauce with smoked fish or kapenta, small dried fish simmered in tomato. Dried and smoked shrimp powder, for its part, flavours a dish without adding pieces.
Going further
Other smoked, dried or canned fish are gathered in the collection of smoked and dried fish from Africa.
