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Sardinhas Assadas
- Easy
- 30 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with char used as punctuation, wood-smoke running underneath, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 12 fat fresh sardines: June sardines, when they are oily and proud; scaled, GUTS IN (tradition) or out (peace at home)
- Coarse sea salt, applied 30 min ahead
- Olive oil
- 4 slices broa or crusty bread; roasted green pepper salad
- Charcoal: a grill pan is the apology, coals are the answer
Equipment
Grill
The skills inside
The words inside
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Allergen screen
Found: gluten · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Salt the sardines heavily 30 min ahead; brush the grill, not the fish, with oil. 30 min
- Grill over hot coals 3–4 min a side without fiddling: the skin releases when it is ready and not before. 4 min
- Slide each sardine onto a slice of bread: the bread is the plate and the sponge.
- Eat with fingers, discarding the spine like a comb. The bread, now soaked in sardine drippings, is the final course.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Grilling over live coals 77 recipes
- The fire was ready before the food was: coals evenly covered in grey ash with no flames licking through and no raw smoke coming off, and a hot zone and a cooler one both available.
- The grate was hot and clean when the food landed, and the food released cleanly from it when the time came to turn rather than tearing away.
- Marks are browned, not burnt: deep colour where the metal touched, with no carbon flaking off and no soot transferred onto the food.
- The interior reaches its target with a thin gradient, not charred outside and cold within, and not driven through by a flare-up.
- What comes off the fire smells of fire and food only: no raw wood smoke, no fuel, nothing acrid at the back of the nose.
Where it goes wrong It went on over live flames instead of settled coals, so the outside charred bitter in the flare-ups while the middle stayed cold, and everything on the plate tastes of soot.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Fino or Manzanilla Sherry
- Also Right
- Muscadet or dry Riesling
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
Salt-cured fish wants a bone-dry, saline partner: Sherry and Atlantic whites answer the cure without fighting it.
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