CATCH AND COOK: Popping the Cherry with FISH N CHIPS in Baja California
As an avid cook, I find building a relationship with your ingredients is incredibly important. These relationships form the more you use them. I quickly started to know what good, and not so good, products were and where to get them. The more I cooked, especially with any kind of animal protein, the more I wanted to be a part of the whole process —from hunt to plate.
I was hanging out in the Troopy in a remote beach in Baja California Sur, reading Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, when Owen comes up to me and asks:
“If I come back with a fish, will you cook it?”
“Of course!” I replied.
“Okay, we’ll be right back.”
Half an hour later, we heard a faint triumphant cheer. There they were, emerging from the water, prize in hand.
MAK and Owen (@bound.for.nowhere) caught a morsel of a scorpion fish.
Baja Gothic, 2022.
The proud fishers.
Owen went straight to work on the fish.
I couldn’t help but to get in on the action too. I just had to have my hand in the process. It was something I’ve been wanting to be a part of for a while.
I couldn’t just idly sit by and only be a part of the tail end of the food chain. I needed to experience what its like to be part of as much as I could.
A mostly finished filet (right), and Chase extracting out the cheek meat (left)
We floundered about (ZING!), filleting the scorpion fish. It was all our first time handling a fish like this. There was no signal to quickly search for a photo of the skeleton so we weren’t blindly cutting into it. It was done all by feel. We eventually just took scissors and snipped down the spine and removed the small individual rib bones after the fact.
We weren’t proud of it, but it produced clean filets which could be cut down to nugget sized.
Soon after, Chase and Aimee (@tightloopsfly) emerged from the water with a trumpet fish. As I was prepping to cook, Chase went ahead and started processing, and filleting the fish himself.
He mentioned, as he handed me the bag of cleaned filets, that the trumpet fish was much, much easier to process. Its body was simpler and more predictable than the scorpion fish.
I went straight to prepping the meal. I was originally wanting to go all out. Maybe a Vietnamese caramelized fish to eat with rice and a side of Vietnamese butter nut squash soup, or baked fish to put into Vietnamese spring rolls (the fresh rice paper kind, not the fried kind). As a collective, we had enough raw ingredients around camp to make any of these other options happen.
In the end, I decided to keep it simple: fish and chips. It’s easy prep and, more importantly, easy to eat.
The group made a grocery run a few days before coming out to this beach so we had on hand a good bit raw ingredients to go around. Chase and Aimee supplied the potatoes and avocado oil.
The chips themselves are self explanatory: cut up into desired fry shape, drop into hot oil, and moments later, crispy chips.
The trumpet fish fillets.
None of us had flour on hand for the batter. What we did have, thanks to @holidayatsee’s Shruthi, was rice flour. I prefer it. It’s crispy and adds an ever so slight chew to each bite. It was a perfect match coupled with the flakey scorpion fish.
The batter itself was simple: rice flour, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and cayenne.
Me, a happy cook in his happy place
The battered scorpion fish frying
It doesn’t get any simpler than frying when out at camp. Plus, who’s going to say no to fried things?
The battered trumpet fish frying away. It was much less flakey than the scorpion fish, and much meatier.
Stella knew exactly where she needed to be throughout this whole process.
The finished product.
I whipped up a super quick tarter sauce that consisted of mayo, relish, lemon juice, cayenne, agave syrup, salt, and pepper.
MAK hovered with abated breath waiting for the first few morsels to fried fish cooling down.
In my book, the hunters always gets first dibs.
Stella didn’t move a damn inch the hole time everyone came in for a bite.
Eventually, Kyia joined in trying to look cute in hope for any drops, or those with a predisposed weakness to cuteness.
After the initial tasting, word quickly spread around camp that it was snack time.
I have become too comfortable buying lumps of protein without seeing/knowing what the actual animal looked like. I know what a cow, chicken, pig, or fish actually look like. But, I feel there’s a disconnect with how we, as modern humans, no longer have a complete connection to their food.
I may not have hunted, and killed, these two fishes, but I had a small hand in processing them. And to me, that’s a step in the right direction.
Next time, the full cherry will be popped.
—Linhbergh