Return and romance of the kingfish
Samar Halarnkar on the perfect fish for Indian cooking; and the easiest, tastiest thing to do with Surmai
I looked around me. Every table in the narrow, outdoor half of the restaurant was full of men—only men—draining quarter bottles of Royal Challenge whisky and steadily getting louder. Most spoke in Marathi, breaking into English and Hindi now and then. The day’s early summer heat had dissipated and—with wives, families temporarily abandoned—the men were enjoying Pune’s late-evening cool breeze.
I was—as I normally do—intently peering at the piles of food the waiters were ferrying to the tables. On a fleeting visit, in an unfamiliar place, there is no better method of assessing what you should eat. I sighed. Every tray was full of the usual, unhealthy stuff: fried pakoras, heavy gravies (mostly fish and mutton), butter naans and similar bastardized north Indian food.
Having a light, fragrant dinner would be a challenge. My dinner companions were vegetarian, and their cream-laden palak paneer and oil-laced tarka dal did nothing for me. Some negotiations with the waiter resulted in a thin, oily surmai (kingfish) gravy and tandoori naans. “Bagha sir, patal aahen, anhi masali fresh aahen (Look sir, it’s thin, and the fish is fresh)," he said, beaming. His job was done—he had satisfied a difficult customer.
The nameless fish curry on that breezy Pune evening was actually quite delicious. The masalas were fresh, the oil merged well into the thin, coconut curry, and the best thing was that the surmai was firm and demerged—to use corporate language—into flakes. Four tandoori rotis later, I was a happy man.
I encountered surmai two days after Pune, in Mumbai, where at much tonier digs near the Gateway of India, I had a seafood paella flecked (well, they were really no more than a few bits) with surmai.
These recent encounters with surmai got me thinking of my rekindled love for—to use its English name—Indo-Pacific king mackerel, aka seer fish or kingfish. It’s a fish with quite a romantic air, really. Ocean anglers know of it as a fighter, a strong fish, its strength perhaps reflected in its firm flesh. I think of it as a wanderer, chasing down smaller fish and generally lording it over the waters of the subcontinental ocean shelves.
A surmai, then, is particularly good for Indian food, given our love of imposed flavours, unlike Western cooking, which likes to have fish and meat that exude their own flavours.
Over the years, I have steamed surmai with oriental spices, poached it with—much to my wife’s horror—single malt, but I have to say that few things top the original family recipe of frying surmai steaks in red-chilli powder, turmeric, salt and tamarind paste. With fried fish now a rare treat for health reasons, I am always on the lookout for substitutes, which is good because it forces me to be more creative.
And so it was that I rose on a warm summer morning in Bengaluru last week and decided to use my mother’s simple chutney-like marinade to bake some surmai. Things were made easier by the absence of spouse and child, away on a holiday sans husband/father: The wife is vegetarian and the four-year-old is not a fish fan, preferring marrow, mutton, chicken, pork—in that order.
Cooking for my parents and I is an easy affair. They are uncomplaining of my experiments—not that they have a choice—but the most important thing is that our tastes are pretty much the same.
I bake/broil a lot of fish these days, all without a drop of oil. Surmai comes in convenient steaks, so a piece from a large fish can suffice for lunch. The only downside with surmai is the ever-soaring cost: In Bengaluru it now costs about ₹ 700 per kg, for a large surmai. That’s more expensive than the best meat.
But as a weekend treat, it could not be better, and it is still far less expensive than the single piece of terrible, tasteless basa that most restaurants force on you these days.
Kingfish baked in banana leaves
Serves 3-4
Ingredients
4-5 palm-sized kingfish steaks
1-2 banana leaves (you can also use foil)
For the marinade
A big bunch of fresh coriander, about a large handful
4-5 green chillies
2 tbsp mint leaves
1 tsp ginger-garlic paste
Salt to taste
Method
Grind the marinade ingredients with water or white vinegar. Marinate the fish in this chutney and set aside for an hour at least. Wash the banana leaves and cut into pieces large enough to wrap the fish. Carefully make packets of individual pieces by wrapping in leaves; turn packets over so that the leaves stay in place. You can also tie the packets with thread. Bake in oven at 200 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Remove soonest, so fish remains moist. Open the parcels and squeeze lime over fish.
This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar also writes the fortnightly science column Frontier Mail for Mint and is the author of the book The Married Man’s Guide To Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.
To read Samar’s previous Lounge columns, click here.
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