Serves 4 people
Ingredients
• 2x Fresh Mackerel fillets
Curing mix:
• 50 grams rock salt
• 50 grams caster sugar
• 1 inch ginger grated and
• 1 lemon zest
For the horseradish cream:
• 100g cream
• 25g horseradish
• tablespoon of lemon juice
Pickled cucumber:
• 1x Japanese cucumber
For pickling liquid:
• 300g water
• 200g white wine vinegar
• 100g caster sugar
• 1 sprig thyme
• 2 cloves of garlic
• tablespoon of coriander seeds
• 3 peppercorns
For the burnt lemon powder:
• 4x whole lemon skins, squeeze on the juices out of the lemons and keep it for something else and put the lemon skins in the oven at 160 degrees for 2 hours
For the Green Pea Sauce:
• 200g green peas
• 200g water
• 100g olive oil
Method
To prepare the fish:
1 Preparing the fish, mix all the curing ingredients together and cover the fish for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes rinse well and dry it of thoroughly.
2 To smoke the mackerel, use any wood chips that you can use for smoking preferably hickory.
3 For smoking the mackerel you need a steamer, Heat up the hickory chips in the bottom of a steamer on the stove top. Heat until the hickory starts smoking and using a blowtorch burn the hickory until it catch fire.
4 Once on fire, using a lid immediately cover. Then in the top part of the steamer place the mackerel fillets and then quickly take the lid off the bottom tray and replace it with the mackerel. In this process try not to loose to much of the smoke.
5 Immediately turn the fire off and leave the mackerel fillets smoking for 3 minutes.
6 Remove the mackerel from the hickory. Cool.
7 After smoking the mackerel take the skin off the fillets, and cut into batons. Two batons of mackerel should suffice for each person.
For the horseradish cream:
1 Bring all the ingrained to boil and then cool down. Peep the cucumber then cut into long batons, place them in a sterilised pickling jar and cover with the liquid, do this 3 days in advance.
Once it is completely dried off and brown blend it to a fine powder.
For the green pea sauce:
1 Blend the water and green peas together. Strain and collect the juices overnight.
2 Using a high speed blender emulsifier with the olive oil.
To assemble the dish:
1 Place dollop of horseradish cream on the plate in the centre, place the mackerel and cucumber batons on top of the cream, and dress it with the green pea dressing.
2 Over the top dust the burnt lemon powder.
Copyright Rishi Naleendra, Cheek by Jowl