FOOD: Grilled blue mackerel. David Moyle
The big thing with mackerel is that you either love it or hate it. It’s an oily fish and there’s no getting away from that.
Traditional treatment of mackerel tends to come from Scandinavian countries, where it is pickled and preserved. The Japanese hold it in some reverence fresh, and treat it closer to raw. It is almost about highlighting the chef ’s skill to be able to process the fish. There’s a definite skill to it and it requires a very sure knife – if you nick the stomach when you’re gutting it, for instance, the high acid content will damage the flesh.
It took me quite a while to truly appreciate mackerel, due to some bad experiences. I’m largely to blame for those. I got it wrong, particularly trying to pickle them. They get powdery – especially if the fish is too old when you’re treating it. The stink really goes all the way through.
It wasn’t until I travelled overseas, especially to Japan, that I genuinely got into mackerel.
The following recipe is a bit of a meet in the middle between the cooked-through method and serving the fish raw. Similar to crustaceans, you are cooking through the skin to caramelise the fats and render them more pleasant.
Cooking these fish is a commitment. I cook them over coals using a Japanese technique, grilling with the dry heat above charcoal rather than through contact with the flame. You cook only on one side, through a wire rack. When the meat turns opaque two-thirds of the way through, with just a bit of crimson left and some caramelisation in the belly, it is ready to take off.
A little tip is to pull it off the grill from tail to head, which makes it less likely to break. Sounds small but it is worth heeding.