Baked Sardines with Shio Koji-Pickled Fennel Salad

Oh, no. I did it again. I came home with a new ingredient only to realize I had no idea how to prepare it — how to transform it from its wild form, still impregnated with the imprint of life, into something tasty, preferably, or, at the very least, suitable for human consumption. After cactus paddles, burdock root and fresh bamboo shoot, my newest kitchen mystery: whole Portuguese sardines.

Of course, eating sardines is no mystery to me; I eat them every week, and could prepare them with my eyes closed: remove plastic or cardboard sheath, pull tab, dump contents into hot pot. But, although tasty, the triangular lumps of flesh that I call sardines, which come tumbling out of the can with a splash and a jiggle, bear little resemblance to the frozen animals I had carried home from the supermarket. To put it another way, they don’t have eyes.

For someone used to equating ‘fish’ with those geometric patties of whitish to pinkish flesh neatly contained between a Styrofoam tray and plastic wrap, handling a whole fish seemed mildly daunting. I had a vision of ending up with an amorphous pile of mutilated flesh, not even suitable for making meatballs for the small fish bones still sticking out from the mess.

Thank goodness for the Internet, I thought, and, with three pairs of stunned eyes surveying me from the countertop, I scrolled through YouTube looking for a mentor or two in the art of disemboweling. After scrutinizing the same video three times, trying to let my confidence be buoyed by Becky Selengut’s affirmations that sardines are “one of the easiest fish to fillet,” I headed to my chopping board and got started on my first victim.

First, the scales came off, not with the back of a spoon, as Selengut had suggested, but with my thumb pad and the tip of my thumbnail (I was terrified of crushing the poor fish). Then, I cleaned out the guts, in all their splendour, and with a few hesitant cuts and sloppy finger choreographies, managed to pull out the backbone and the attached head. My little headless sardine fillet looked surprisingly handsome, a plump little envelope of flesh with iridescent silver skin, more Styrofoam-tray than fishing-net.

Like leaving raw vegetables on your counter for weeks at a time, or dropping foods into giant vats of dangerously hot oil, preparing sardines, it seemed, was a lot less mystical than I had made it out to be.

Flavour Palette

I am somewhat notorious for my propensity for disregarding recipes, but I do enjoy using them as a roadmap of sorts to inspire new ideas around what ingredients to pair together, like a palette of flavours that I can use to paint my own canvas.

If cooking is my way of traveling vicariously, then, here would be the blurb in the travel brochure for today’s dish:

“an island of contrasts, of sumptuousness and poverty, a crossroads of cultures,” writes Elena Kostioukovitch, “[where] everything is carried to excess: the sunlight, unbearable (for a foreigner) without dark glasses; the blue of sky and sea; the green of cultivated estates; the fragrances. Here the immediacy and sensuality of life is almost too intense to take in all at once; [It] must often be experienced through recollection or from a distance. It is saturated with the past, a past that imbues the warm flesh of the present.” In the same vein, Mary Taylor Simeti describes it as a culture with “very little future but a very ancient past,” “an insular culture compacted by centuries of foreign conquest and domestic oppression.”

Sounds interesting? Pack your bags. We are going to Sicily.

A land of contrast describes not only its landscapes and people, but also its tumultuous history. With its position at the heart of the Mediterranean, Sicily has long been coveted and fought over by factions from all four of the cardinal directions, from the Greeks to the Arabs, the Spanish to the Bourbons. We therefore find a smattering of influences from distant lands less prominent in continental Italy.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Sicilian cuisine. The history of Sicily can just as well be told through the successive waves of new ingredients and cooking techniques that arrived on its shores. In Classical times, the Greeks brought wine, wheat bread and cheese. The Romans cultivated geese and prized wild fennel and pine nuts. The Arabs from the South brought apricots, sugar, citrus fruit, melons, figs, rice, saffron, raisins, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, cinnamon, jasmine and carob. The Spanish introduced foods from the New World, such as cocoa, corn, turkeys and tomatoes, and from the Bourbon came a tradition of exuberance and a love of onions.

Garnishes, clockwise from top right: fennel fronds, toasted currants and pine nuts, toasted umami almond flour crumbs

Peter Robb acknowledges this confused constellation of influences in his book, Midnight in Sicily, when he talks about pasta con le sarde (pasta with sardines), the dish whose ingredients most inspired my own sardine recipe:

“Pasta con le sarde is a quintessentially Palermo dish and oddly little known outside the city, let alone outside Sicily. It’s a fairly simple dish. It also sounds a little odd to anyone who doesn’t actually know it […] the flesh of the fresh sardines is mixed and sauteed with already sauteed chopped onions and a little salted anchovy. The crucial additional ingredient is wild fennel, boiled and chopped and added to the sardines along with pine nuts, raisins and saffron […] What nobody mentioned was that this was surely an Arab dish. You only had to look at the ingredients. The tomatoes would have been added five hundred years after the Arabs invented this way of presenting their newly-invented long thin strands of pasta asciutta, when Columbus brought the fruit back from the Americas to transform southern Italy’s cooking.”

Odd… Yet oddly delightful? Of course, I had to bring my own influences to this hodgepodge of ingredients. I pickled the fennel with shallots instead of cooking them, with the Japanese condiment shio koji. A hat tip to Japanese cuisine also manifested itself when I added smoked bonito flakes to my mixture of almond flour to create a toasted garnish for the sardines (instead of the more typical garnish of breadcrumbs).

Joëlle

Serves 2

Baked Sardines with Shio Koji-Pickled Fennel Salad

Inspired by the flavours of Sicily, this vibrant dish features baked sardines and a pickled fennel salad with a lemon chive dressing, topped with toasted currants and pine nuts.

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Ingredients

• 6 large sardines, scaled, gutted and deboned
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp shio koji
For the Pickled Fennel
• 1 small fennel, thinly sliced (about 1/2 cup)
• (fronds saved for later)
• 1 small shallot, thinly sliced
• 1 tbsp shio koji
For the Almond Crumbs
• 1/3 cup almond flour
• 3 tbsp bonito flakes,
• 1 tsp dried parsley
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp water
For the Salad
• 1 tbsp pine nuts
• 1 tbsp currants
• 2 tbsp chives
• Black pepper
• Zest of one lemon
• Juice of 1/4-1/2 lemon
• Fennel fronds, roughly chopped

Instructions

1. Combine fennel, shallot and shio koji in a small mixing bowl and set aside, at room temperature, for 30 minutes or more.
2. Preheat the oven to 425°C. Wash sardines, scale them using your thumbs or the back of a spoon. Remove the guts, heads and backbone. Rub the inside of a baking dish with a bit of olive oil. Rub the rest of the oil on the sardines, and stuff them with a bit of shio koji.
3. Cover and bake sardines for 18-20 minutes.
4. While the sardines are cooking, put bonito flakes in a medium sized bowl, and massage them between your fingers until they are reduced to about a tablespoon of small flakes. Add almond flour, parsley, garlic powder and salt and mix to combine. Stir in a tablespoon of water, breaking up any large clumps of almond flour.
5. Heat a skillet over medium heat. Pour in the almond flour mixture and stir for a few minutes until dry and brown. Remove from heat and transfer to a small bowl.
6. Return the skillet to the stovetop (still on medium heat) and toast pine nuts and currants until the pine nuts are fragrant and golden brown.
7. Mix lemon zest, lemon juice, chives and black pepper into the pickled fennel and shallots. Spoon some of the salad onto two small plates.
8. Divide the sardines between the plates.
9. Garnish with fennel fronds, almonds crumbs, pine nuts and currants.

Notes

Shio koji (塩麹) is a lacto-fermented mixture of rice koji (rice inoculated with aspergillus oryzae spore -- the basis for many well-know Japanese ferments such as miso, sake and soy sauce). It provides enzymes and probiotics while imparting the dish with a unique umami flavour. You can substitute sea salt, himalayan salt or fish sauce. To learn more about shio koji, how to make it at home, and how to use it in the kitchen, click here.

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https://www.joellegaudet.com/2019/04/17/baked-sardines-with-shio-koji-pickled-fennel-salad/

References

Kostioukovitch, E. (2010). Why Italians love to talk about food. London: Duckworth.
Simeti, M. T. (2009). Sicilian food. Kent Town, S. Aust.: Wakefield Press.
Robb, P. (2015). Midnight in Sicily. London: Vintage Books.