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Planning a grilled or baked fish delicacy for your next weekend dinner? Skip your usual marinade and choose an aromatic one. While soy sauce, spices, garlic, basil, olive oil and lemon juice work just fine for most recipes, a herbaceous marinade can add a lot of complexity while you're prepping fish for winter recipes (especially grilled ones).
Also Read: Baked Fish (Bhetki) Recipe
If you're planning to bake salmon, cod, basa, bhetkii, Bombay duck, rawas etc, a mint and ginger marinade can be a great option. Most freshwater fish lack the briny flavour and are milder in taste; while dominant sauces and flavours are best to prepare these varieties of fish in the summers, in the winters the delicate palate of the fish is the perfect vehicle to experiment with elevated or herb-forward sauces.
Why Mint And Ginger?
For grilled recipes, chefs usually recommend an extra layer of spice so that soft herbs get their time to shine as well. Ginger, mint and spring onion is also a classic Cantonese marinade when baking a fish. When seasoning a mild fish such as basa, strong aromatics like garlic or cumin often overpower the cooked dish, leaving little room for microgreens or subtle seasoning to show up on the palate of the dish.
A good way to go for baked, grilled or barbecued dishes is to use a marinade of cilantro, lime juice and black pepper as a prepping layer. Let the fish sit in the first marinade for thirty minutes and then prepare another layer with canola oil, large red chillies, ginger, mint (and Chinese cooking wine if available). Here ginger and mint act as the primary flavours and the cool, muted sweetness of the mint cuts through ginger's rich, woody savouriness, while the chillies pack in the heat.
However, none of these flavours is potent enough to overpower the smokiness of the grilled fish. However, if you want your fish to taste light and want a light roast, place the ingredients to your marinade in a pot with your fish so they can poach next to one another. The ginger, mint, and chilli infuse the water and the fish absorb it, taking on a subtle, spicy flavour.
How to pair it?
Ginger is a warm aromatic, while mint is a cool one which makes the two ingredients work so well together. In most Indian fish preparations the fish is seared first; it is then used in a curry or grilled on a tandoor. But a ginger-mint-chilli marinade would work best for Mediterranean recipes, some Thai-baked fish recipes and certain saucy European grilled and baked dishes. Like a baked fish fillet or a Chinese scallion fish.
For Thai recipes, jasmine rice and a side of vegetable coconut curry would pair best with a dish made with ginger and mint. For a basic baked fish made with this marinade, pair it with a bright, balsamic salad made with parsley.
