Tel Koi—peyaj-ada diye
Climbing perch cooked in an onion–ginger–chilli sauce
- Cooking time40 mins
Calories438kcal
In this recipe, Rohitashwa Guha (Turjo), whose family hails from pre-Partition Dhaka, shows us his grandmother's recipe of "tel koi".
There are many variations of this dish all over Bengal, so much so that it may be best to think of "tel koi" as a style of cooking the koi fish rather than a single recipe. "Tel" in Bengali means oil and "koi" is the climbing perch fish (not to be confused with the Japanese "koi"). So "tel koi" is koi fish cooked until oil floats on top. That is about where the similarities between all of the "tel koi" variations end.
Turjo's version of this recipe, in sharp contrast to the mustard sauce version of his aunt, Tapati Lahiri, that we saw a few weeks back, uses whole cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and bay leaves to flavour the mustard oil in which the fish is cooked. The koi fish is then cooked gently in the juices extracted from onion and ginger. The dish is ready to eat in under half an hour if you don't count the time it takes to clean the fish.
Koi fish is always bought live. These days fish mongers happily scale and cut the fish for you. Even then the fish is very slimy and it takes a good bit of scrubbing with either coarse salt or whole-wheat flour to rid it off the slippery stuff. It is all well-worth the effort, of course—koi is meaty, flavourful and delicious.
We've served this version of tel koi, cooked in an onion-ginger-chilli sauce, with parboiled Mohanshal rice.
Ingredients
- 200 g koi machh (climbing perch)
- 6 g salt
- 6 g sugar
- ½ tsp turmeric
- 8 g dried red chillies
- 6 g green chillies (plus extra for finishing)
- 100 g onion
- 20 g ginger
- 60 g total mustard oil
- 3 bay leaves
- 5 cardamom
- 2 cinnamon
- 5 cloves
Method
- Soak the dried red chillies in hot water for 15 mins, until softened. Then grind them to a smooth paste along with 6 g green chillies.
- Also grind onions and ginger to a smooth paste, and extract the juice by passing the paste through a tea-strainer. Squeeze until the fibre is dry. In this recipe we need just the juice, and not the fibrous pulp.
- Coat the fish with salt, turmeric, sugar, onion–ginger juice, dried red chilli–green chilli paste, and half the mustard oil (30 g). Allow it to marinate for 15 to 20 mins.
- Heat the remaining mustard oil in a kadai.
- Temper it with bay leaves, cardamom, cinnamon and cloves.
- Lower the marinated fish one by one.
- Cover and cook on low heat for 12–15 mins, turning the fish over once midway through.
- Open the lid, and dry up any excess liquid until the gravy thickens and oil floats to the surface. We've served it with hot Mohanshal rice.
