Grilled capitaine

Ingredients

• Nile perch or pike-perch — whole, gutted2 kg
• Onions5
• Mustard2 tbsp
• Lemons3
• Garlic6 clove
• Ginger30 g
• Chilli2
• Stock cube1
• Plantains3
• Vegetable oil120 ml
• Salt and pepperto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Cut deep slashes to the bone on both sides of the fish, every three centimetres.

   10 min

2. 2

   Grind the garlic, ginger, chilli, stock cube, lemon juice and oil into a paste and work it into the cuts.

   15 min

3. 3

   Leave the fish to marinate for an hour in the cold.

   10 min

4. 4

   Slice the onions and sweat them in oil over a low heat for thirty minutes, to a caramel colour.

   32 min

5. 5

   Stir the mustard and lemon juice into the onions and season; that is the yet sauce.

   6 min

6. 6

   Grill the fish over indirect heat, twenty minutes a side.

   45 min

7. 7

   Fry the plantain and serve the fish under the onion sauce, with the plantain and lemon.

   12 min

About the dish

Capitaine, the Nile perch of the Niger, is a large fish with firm white flesh. A whole one grills for forty minutes and holds together on the grate.

The yet sauce is made separately: onion sweated in oil for half an hour to caramelisation, then finished with mustard and lemon. It is sharp and sweet at once.

The fish is slashed to the bone on both sides. Heat travels through the cuts and marinade enters them, so a thick fish has no raw middle.

Worth knowing

• — Oil the grate and heat it before the fish goes on. On a cold one the skin sticks and stays on the bars.
• — Turn it once, with two spatulas. Every extra movement breaks the fish along the slashes.
• — The onion must not be fried fast. Thirty minutes over a low flame is the whole sauce; browned in ten it turns bitter instead of sweet.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

620 kcal

Protein

56 g

Fat

26 g

Carbs

42 g

More from Mali

• Tigadegena — Meat in a thick peanut sauce with vegetables. The Malian Sunday lunch.