Fish

By Herb Pilles

After wandering through Sentosa’s new aquarium I was flush with inspiration and rushed right over to my local fish market the next morning.  If your Singapore experience has not included an early morning visit to the wet market, and if you love fresh, local produce and food-less-travelled, you have missed something quintessentially Asian.  Sure you can buy fish at the supermarket, but you would miss out meeting some great characters (the fish sellers, not the fish), and you would miss an astonishing  variety of seafood that could not be any fresher unless you had caught it yourself.

Mr. Chua Han Kuan of Yuhua Market on Jurong East Ave 1 holds up my dinner, a gorgeous red snapper.  It was cooked whole, stuffed with lemon and fresh dill, both sides slashed, then rubbed with tahini sauce, sprinkled with crushed fennel and cumin seeds, and  baked in a hot oven for about 30 minutes.  Still hot from the oven, it was doused then basted with a cup of flaming Pernod.  It was superb!

HOW TO CLEAN A SQUID

“But what do I do with it?”  While most fish are pretty straight forward, some things can be intimidating, such as cleaning a squid, but if you can get over the squeemishness, the results are infinitely rewarding.

1:  Grasp the squid by the head and gently pull it out of the tube.  You may wish to keep the tentacles, but discard the head.   You can keep the tentacles together in the shape of a crown by carefully cutting around the top of the head, keeping a small band intact.

2: Poking out of the top of the sack you will find what looks like a clear piece of plastic.  Pull it out in one piece and discard.

 3:  Firmly grab one of the fins and pull it away from the body, taking the thin membrane of reddish skin with it.  The skin and the other fin should all come off nicely in one piece, but pull off any bits you might have missed.  Discard.

4:  Check the inside of the sack to see if you’ve missed anything, like some undigested little fish. 

5:  From here on, it’s easy.   Cut it into lovely rings, into squares, or leave it whole to be stuffed.  Whatever you decide, and depending on your recipe, cook squid for less than a minute, or for over an hour!