Grilled Dorada, Papas Arrugadas, and Padrón Peppers
Anyone who has Tenerife and food in the same thought will undoubtedly have a mental image of some sort of seafood. This also applies to Americans, once they’ve looked up what Tenerife is. We’ve been here a couple weeks now, and we’ve only cooked fish once. This is…entirely my fault.
See, I grew up in the Great Lakes region of the US, and we ate fish all the time. I went to high school near the Atlantic Ocean as well, meaning I’m used to “catch of the day” sorts of seafood meals. What this means, however, is large fish. For the past quarter of a century, I’ve lived in Estonia, where apart from imported salmon and trout, most of the fish is rather small, like herring. Small fish means bony fish. I’m not a big fan of choking to death, or choking at all. This might be why I’m divorced.
Smaller fish also typically have a somewhat stronger “fish smell”, if that makes sense. As a consequence, I by default find all small fish unappetizing, to say the least. Thus I was loath to sample fish in Tenerife. Katrin however, to her credit, knows how to cook a fish. Big fish, little fish, it doesn’t matter, she’s Estonian. She can do it, and she did!
Choosing the right fish to grill
We went to the local market, and picked out a fish called a “dorada”, which officially translates as “gilt-head bream”. I thought it was sea bass by the look of it, and so did Katrin, so imagine our surprise when we found ourselves enjoying a delicious meal of something we’d never heard of before. That’s another one of my problems with seafood…the names.
You can eat pork, beef is great, and everyone who eats meat loves chicken. Now let’s make these names like seafood, and see if you’d still want to eat it. Tonight’s menu includes gilt-head pork, filet of red-lipped batbeef, or slippery dick chicken nuggets for the kiddos. (These are all real fish names, by the way.)
Buying fish at the market
Once we’d chosen our two fish, the fishmonger at the market weighed them, and then proceeded to clean and gut them, and threw away the guts. Not that I wanted to save the guts and attempt some sort of odd soup, but it would have been nice if the fish had been weighed after their innards had been removed. This just seemed rather dishonest to me. But as I have so little experience in the past few years with eating fish, I might be completely oblivious to the fact that the whole world is dishonest when it comes to selling fish. Next time I know to choose the fish with the smallest guts, to save fifty cents for the free service of cleaning and gutting.
And how exactly can you find out which fish have the smallest guts? Learn how to ask it in Spanish. Then leave a comment here to let us know what happened.
Rinse the fish well with cold water to remove any undesirables, such as fish (kidding). I mean any rogue scales, innards, bits of blood, that sort of thing. Sprinkle some salt into the belly, then add some crushed garlic cloves, lemon slices, and maybe a few sprigs of parsley, if you can find them. If you have lemons left over from some other day in your fridge, this would be a good place to use them, so they don’t go to waste. You can also add them to the green beans, as described below. The lemons stuffed into the fish are mainly for moisture and aroma, so they don’t need to be perfect. If you have trouble closing the fish after stuffing it, try using toothpicks.
Techniques for grilling fish
Make sure your grill is very clean, maybe even a bit greased with cooking oil. This helps prevent the fish from sticking to it. If you just can’t get the grill shiny clean, consider grilling the fish on aluminum foil. The only downside to this is the less smoky flavor of the fish. You should additionally salt and oil the fish on the skin.
You could also wrap the fish in aluminum foil, but you’ll end up with steamed fish, which is also good, but there won’t be any crisp skin, which adds to the flavor of the flesh.
Each fish needs around seven to ten minutes per side. Be extra careful not to break the skin when flipping and removing the fish. If you grill directly on the grill, once you remove the fish, you can take any stale bread you might have, sprinkle some olive oil on it, and grill it where the fish was, on both sides.
Peppers on the grill
For her next act, Katrin produced a pot of pious Padrón peppers that she picked up from the same market. El pimiento de Padrón in Spanish, these small, green peppers became available in Spain after Franciscan monks (who were pious) returned from the Americas in the early 1500s. Legend has it that they received these peppers first from none other than Hernán Cortés, which means that before they were eliminated from existence, the Aztecs would have eaten these peppers, too. Often served as a popular tapas, all you have to do is douse them in olive oil, and then grill them for a minute or two before turning them over. Wait for this though until just after you’ve flipped the fish on the grill as well. When you remove them, and before serving, sprinkle them with salt. The best salt would be sea salt from a salt mill, for that extra oomph.
For added excitement, keep in mind that these peppers are not spicy. Except for the occasional, random spicy one. You never know which ones will be spicy, so there’s often a surprise.
Green beans for the win!
The green beans are a longer variety, but otherwise standard beans. Soak them for a while if that is your habit (it’s mine, but Katrin laughs at me when I do that), and then snip the ends off. Boil them for up to ten minutes until tender, then drain the water. In a skillet, sauté two to three cloves of chopped garlic for half a minute in butter, then add the beans, and mix well. You should already have some lemon ready from the fish, so you can grate some lemon zest and add it to the beans, along with a bit of freshly squeezed lemon juice. When these green beans are ready to be served, season them with a dash of salt. If you do it right, these beans will be the talk of the table.
Wrinkled potatoes, Canary-style
The most iconic dish of the Canary Islands is the final one in this recipe: “papas arrugadas”, or “Canary-style potatoes”. It basically means “wrinkled potatoes”. This is our first time making them, so we won’t talk too much about techniques here, apart from the basics, because these potatoes are such a popular dish here that we will definitely revisit them in future posts.
Original recipes called for 250 grams of salt per kilo of potatoes, but if you’re more interested in feeding your family than killing them, you can use drastically less salt, for example two to three tablespoons. Here’s what we did:
Wash the potatoes to remove any unwanted dirt, but don’t peel them;
Place the potatoes in a pot, and add water, but be careful not to cover them in water…this part is very important;
Add the salt, and stir;
Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-high, for 20 to 30 minutes until they’re tender enough to eat;
Drain the remaining water (there shouldn’t be much), and keep the pot over heat for a few moments until the skin of the potatoes becomes wrinkly, and has their signature salty, whitish appearance.
How to choose potatoes in the shop: if you live in Tenerife or the Canaries, you can easily look for potatoes that say, “papa para arrugar”, or “potatoes for wrinkling”. If you don’t live here, but would still like to try this recipe, look for smaller, or even new potatoes. The technique will still work.
Lots of tips for papas arrugadas
Oh and one final tip: many people like to cover the pot with a cloth. This helps with water evaporation. We’ll try it next time.
This was our first fully Tenerife-style meal cooked entirely at home, and it was delectable. If you’re not in Tenerife, you can still try some of these recipes, such as the green beans, this special technique for boiling potatoes, and guilt-free gilt-head bream, or at the very least something similar. Two PEPPERS up!
