Thai Whole Fish

Spicy, Citrusy Heaven

This has always been one of my all-time favourite Thai dishes, maybe even my all-time favourite dish full altogether! And the good news is it’s very quick and easy to make with not too many ingredients, although sadly, one of those ingredients, Thai basil, is proving impossible to find in Kenya, either ready to eat or as seeds to grow myself (which I would love) so I have to use coriander instead for all of the Thai dishes that I make here. I have coriander growing in the garden, and it’s my joint favourite herb (along with Thai basil) so it’s not a great shame - I would just love to find Thai basil and I hope I do at some point!

Luckily for this dish I also have some of the other ingredients readily available in the garden, lime leaves, lemongrass, papaya (best to use unripe green papayas if possible) and chillies. Here I’m using my favourite chillies, scotch bonnets, which are about ten times hotter than the more common finger chillies but, most importantly, they have an amazing sweet fruity flavour - very similar to habanero chillies :-) Previously I was growing finger chillies but I have thousands in the freezer now, and a few hundred I sun-dried for a couple of weeks to make chilli powder, so I thought I’d try to grow scotch bonnets instead. They take a bit longer to grow than finger chillies, around three months, but they are so hot and delicious that I’m not going to plant any more finger chillies for a while, just more scotch bonnets :-)

So, here’s my papaya, lemongrass, lime leaves, and scotch bonnets from the garden:

The lemongrass in the garden serves two purposes - the leaves can be used to make a really nice citrusy milky tea (quite common here), and the stalks can be used for Thai cooking as I’m doing here :-)

Next, the fish. Where I live on the coast of Kenya, there is lots of fresh fish available very cheaply (around £3 for a kilo of whole fish) but a very limited choice of options. The most common are tafi (rabbit fish) and changu (snapper), but here I’m using kole kole (trevally). I’ve never seen trevally in the UK to be honest, probably because it’s a subtropical fish. Seabass and tilapia (not available here) also work very well. Here’s my delivery of kole kole:

I like to prepare all of my ingredients before I start cooking, whenever I make anything really, so here I have slices of lime, lime leaves, sliced scotch bonnet chillies, some chopped garlic and ginger, and some shredded carrots and papaya. As well as this I made a litre of chicken stock mixed with a good glug of Thai fish sauce:

Once all this is done, it’s very quick and easy. Simply fry the garlic and ginger in a big saucepan for a minute or two (a saucepan big enough to hold two whole fish, if you are making for two people), pour in the stock and fish sauce mix, bring this to the boil, add all of the other ingredients (except the lime slices and coriander garnish) and leave it to simmer for around ten minutes depending on the size and thickness of your fish:

Once that’s done, serve in two deep bowls, and sprinkle the chopped coriander over the top and a couple of slices of lime per bowl :-)