#21 The art of cooking cheap: part two
Have you ever had fish head? Fish collar? Fish belly? They're all delicious. Plus, an introduction to Notes.
I don’t mean to shock anyone. In most of Asia, all those fish parts are consumed as food and many are considered delicacies, so not all of them are cheap.
But if you are in a part of the world where these fish parts are discarded, well, there’s so much that you can do with them.
Fish head
Singaporean fish head curry, a fusion of Indian and Chinese cuisines, is world famous and often recommended as a “must try” for tourists. The thing is, the dish doesn’t come with instructions on how it should be eaten. You have to know where to look for edible parts of the fish head.
For the home cook, getting acquainted with fish head as food begins even earlier. One has to know which which fish head can be cooked into a good dish. For starters, not all fish heads are edible. Some fish have very little flesh in the head. Catfish head, for instance, is mostly bone. But you’ll get a lot from the head of a salmon, snapper, grouper or trevally.
So, which parts of the fish head are edible?
The gelatinous skin that covers the top and sides of the head all the way to the mouth.
The “cheeks” or the flesh hidden beneath the plate-like bones that cover both sides of the head.
The eyes.
How is fish head cooked? That depends on the dish. Cook it whole or halved, it’s up to you.
How is fish head served? Whole, halved or sanitized.
Fish head soup with coconut cream (get the recipe).
By sanitized, I mean, cook the fish head, pick all the edible parts and use in a dish. For example:
Fish head, vegetables and yogurt chowder (get the recipe).
Fish belly
The part of the fish where the meat is thinnest, the belly consists of the soft fish flesh underneath a layer of fat. It is offal in some cultures; it is a delicacy in others. Here at home, we love salmon belly, tuna belly and milkfish (bangus) belly.
Salmon belly sinigang (get the recipe)
Bangus (milkfish) belly in gingered coconut broth (get the recipe)
Fish collar
A grillmaster’s dream. Gelatinous fish flesh cradled in a bone shaped like a curved angular bar. Here’s how we grill fish collar.
Grilled fish collar (inihaw na panga ng tuna) (get the recipe)
Now, about Notes
It’s a new feature of Substack, the service I use to send my newsletter to your inbox.
Notes is… think of it as something between Twitter and Facebook, maybe even with a bit of Instagram thrown in. Short posts. Links to interesting reads. Images. All in one feed. I’ve posted one Note just to try it, I’ve read Notes of fellow writers on Substack, and it looks like it can actually be fun.
So, yes, I have decided to post Notes on a regular basis. If you want to see the feed where my Notes and newsletters appear (Notes are not sent out to newsletter subscribers), just go to my Substack profile. I hope we can say hi! to each other there.
P. S. This newsletter was supposed to cover both seafood and poultry, but I realized there’s so much to be said about fish head, collar and belly that the “seafood” part is already an entire post. And I wanted to tell you about Notes too. So, the “poultry” part will be in newsletter #22.