Banana Leaf Grilled Fish with Asian-ish Romesco
It’s well-past grilling season in the US, but here in Malaysia—a land of perpetual summer—any day is a good day for grilling. (Well, there’s a high chance you’ll have to contend with a sudden, heavy downpour, so really, half the days in the year, which is still more than most other places I suppose!)
Instead of barbecued meats and kebab-ish skewers though, Malaysians are prone to grilling things in banana leaves. In curbside stalls and Malay restaurants throughout the country, you’ll find pulut bakar (a dish of sambal-stuffed rice, wrapped in banana leaves), lepat pisang and lepat ubi (pureed bananas and yam stuffed into—you guessed it—banana leaves), alongside stingray fins and whole fish wrapped yet again in banana leaves and plonked on the grill to cook until smoky and charred.
And it’s the latter which got me started on this recipe. At the quintessential Malay roadside warung, you’ll get sambal-stuffed mackerels and ray fins. But knowing me, there’s always gonna be a kooky twist.
So I turned to romesco, a sweet, nutty, chunky Italian sauce that’s most often had with fish, made popular by the fishermen of Catalonia in the 15th century. While traditional romescos are made with tomatoes, peppers, garlic, nuts (often almonds or hazelnuts), sometimes stale bread, and a good dose of quanto basta from your nonna, all blended together, for my romesco, I brought upon it an Asian invasion of spice and flavour. Ginger, lemongrass, a splash of Shaoxing, and an excess of garlic found their way into the sauce. And of course, to give it that hair-tingling edge, I added two bird’s eye chilies. Spicy.
But of course, the main aroma, the main fragrance will still come from the banana leaf itself. When you expose the leaves of the banana plant to the heat of the grill, it burns sweet with the aroma of fresh-cut herbs and a tropical grassiness, its grill marks charring onto the fish itself, enveloping the fish with a honeyed, smoky scent, bringing you right back to a loud, hectic Malaysian warung, if said warung was set on a Catalan seaside town…
Banana Leaf Grilled Fish with Asian-ish Romesco Sauce
Serves 2-4
Ingredients
2 threadfins (or any other similar, medium-sized white fish)
½ teaspoon salt
2 medium banana leaves, cut into a 15-inch x 10-inch rectangle
Asian-ish Romesco
1 large red/orange Palermo pepper, or bell pepper
2 bird’s eye chillies
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1-inch piece of ginger, skin removed
½ a lemongrass stalk, chopped
80g toasted almonds
50ml tomato puree, can be substituted with 10ml of thick tomato paste + 40ml water.
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar, or sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon Shaoxing wine
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
½ teaspoon sea salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
50ml olive oil
Directions
Pepper: Roast the pepper over an open flame (or using a blowtorch) until the skin is completely charred and blistered. Let it sit in a covered bowl for 5-10 minutes, to steam slightly. Then, using a spoon, scratch off the charred skin as best you can. (If possible, do not wash the pepper under running water; you’ll be washing the flavour away! It’s okay if little bits of char are left behind, they’ll just add a touch of smokiness of the sauce.) Then, cut open the pepper and remove the seeds and stem.
Sauce: Put all the ingredients for the sauce, except for the olive oil, into a blender or food processor, and blend it for 10-15 seconds until it all barely comes together but is still relatively chunky. Put the blender on its lowest setting, and drizzle in a small stream of olive oil as it blends. The sauce is done when all the oil is blended in!
Prep fish: Clean the fish. Remove the guts and scales, and trim off its fins if they’re too long. Make two long slices along both sides of the top fin, to create two cavities where you can stuff with sauce. Sprinkle a pinch or two of salt onto the fish, then slather the sauce all over the fish, in its belly and in the two cavities you just made. Then, brush a bit more sauce onto the banana leaf, and roll up the fish within the banana leaf, securing the overlapping ends with two toothpicks.
Grill!:Heat up your grill (or griddle pan with a bit of oil if you don’t have a grill) until just smoking, then place the wrapped fish onto the grill, letting it cook for 6-8 minutes, before flipping it over and cooking for another 5-ish minutes. The banana leaf should be pretty charred at this point, and the insides just cooked through and still moist.
Serve: Unwrap the fish from the banana leaf, and serve it whole.