Ginger Garlic Bluefish Recipe

Tip: this recipe calls for ginger and scallion. As with scallions mentioned in an earlier article, grate the ginger root until you're sick of grating, use the portion you need, and store the rest into a Ziplock bag in the freezer so it doesn't spoil.

I'm posting this recipe because I wrote about how bluefish can be purchased for as little as $2.29 a pound in Boston.

Ingredients:

• Bluefish fillet (or whole, cleaned mackerel)
• Salt
• Garlic
• Cooking oil
  
• 1 tablespoon grated ginger (preferably fresh)
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1 1/2 tablespoon sugar
  
• 1/4 cooking rice wine/sherry (optional)
  
• A few drops of sesame oil (optional)
• Chili sauce (optional)
  
• A sprinkle of scallion (thinly sliced)
  

Like mackerel, bluefish is a fishier tasting fish, and some people are turned off by it. But making blue fish with ginger and garlic will diffuse the strong taste. This will also work on a whole mackerel. You can choose to grill, broil or bake the fish, but I prefer grill or broil, as the charred taste complements the fish.

1) Marinate the fish.
When I cook, I usually improvise, so these measurements don't have to be exact. Take your bluefish fillets and dust a light layer of salt and garlic all over it (can be substituted with garlic salt). Brush some cooking oil on both sides of each fillet. Let it sit in your refrigerator for a few hours.

2) Make the sauce.
Whisk together the ginger, soy sauce, sugar, cooking wine, sesame oil, and chili sauce in a small bowl. Sprinkle the scallion into the sauce.

3) Brush more oil over the fillets. Grill/broil/bake the fish at a high temperature (preheated to 450 F). Check after 8 minutes. If you're using a whole mackerel, you may want to turn it over after 5 minutes and return it to the oven for another 5. The fish is ready when you can see that it's flaky. Fish does not take very long to cook.

4) Remove fish from oven. Spoon sauce over the fish. Serve hot. It's very good with white jasmine rice and green, leafy veggies.

Fresh Bluefish at $2.29 per pound

It's astounding how few varieties of fish most supermarkets carry. I often wonder whether it's really the consumer demands that generated our "over-fishing" problems, or whether it is the lack of demand-generation effort on the part of the retailers to encourage consumers to eat types of fish that are plentiful from our oceans.

On a good day, if you go to a general supermarket in the Boston area (e.g., Stop & Shop, Hannaford, Wholefoods, Shaws, Foodmaster, Roche Brothers), you may find one kind of fish for $5.99 a pound (even cat fish costs this much these days), but most will priced around $8.99 a pound. The varieties are usually limited to salmon, tuna, swordfish, cod, haddock, catfish, tilapia, trout, and your usual New England shellfish. Recently, I've been seeing more swai and pollack as well. But generally these are it. And they're expensive. For convenience sake, sometimes, I'd end up buying fish there, but I usually wait until I have to shop at Kam Man, the large Chinese Supermarket near my home in Quincy. I'm lucky that I live in a very racially diverse enough town where there is such a supermarket.

There are many, many more varieties of fish there at Kam Man that you don't see at other supermarkets. These are usually the plentiful fish and are the bargain items. The salmon is generally not much below prices at other supermarkets.

Most of this fish are very fresh–some (such as tilapia) are even live in tanks. You have to choose a fish, pick it up with a pair of tongs (as pictured above) and put it into a basket and then ask the clerk to clean and cut it for you. For bigger fish such as salmon and grouper and carp, you can get it by the pound, but for smaller fish, you have to pick a whole fish, which they weigh entirely and then cut and clean. Yesterday, I ended buying a 3.25 pound bluefish for $7.42 (@ $2.29 a lb). I had the clerk filet it, keeping the bones in the bag. Each filet will be served as entrées for two (a total of 4 servings), and the bones, head, and tail I plan to keep for fish stock.

My message here is: open your mind to ethnic supermarkets. You're likely to find good quality produce. More on how I prepared the bluefish later.