So a few months ago I was browsing the meat department at my local Asian market looking for deals. I do this at most grocery stores, just buy what’s on sale to stick in my freezer and find a use for it later. As long as you’re alright with sometimes working with unfamiliar cuts (especially when shopping at a non-Western market) this is the best way I’ve found to get affordable protein that’s not exclusively plant based.
Anyway.
I spotted some fish. This fish was dirt cheap. I’ve never seen any meat priced this low. Like, look at this.
Yes, I paid $1.32 USD for 1.3 pounds of meat! What a steal! I’ve never cooked mackerel before but I’ve had it from a can and enjoy it, so I figured, heck, for that price I can’t not buy it. So I did and chucked it in the freezer for another day.
This week, that day came.
I organized my freezer a couple days ago because it had become a cluttered and disorganized mess, and was reminded of this cheap fish I’d bought. Decided I could use it for dinner this week and took it out to thaw. Only after I’d thawed it did I realize why this was so cheap.
If you’re more familiar with fish anatomy than I am, you might already spot the issue. But the meat was in the tray cut side up like this, with the plastic wrap and above label obscuring it a bit, and I thought I just had some chunks of fish body. I knew I’d need to navigate bones, but I was unprepared for what I really had.
SURPRISE!!
Now, I have eaten fish head before, but I’ve never cooked with it, and not realizing what I had in my possession, turning the meat over to discover it was looking at me was a bit of a shock.
I put it back down, cut side up so it would stop staring, and stepped back to gather myself. I’ve worked with weird cuts of meat before (beef tongue is a favorite of mine!), and like I said I have eaten fish heads, so I was sure I would still be able to make a good dinner with it. It just wasn’t what I was expecting so I needed to recover. I watched a couple videos of people making soup with fish heads and other videos of people eating them grilled and scoured the internet for recipes, and found exactly zero examples of people making what I had planned using the heads of a fish. Oh well, we carry on.
This is what dinner looked like when it was done!
I cooked some onion and two peppers from my garden (shishito and Serrano, so we had a mix of sweet and hot) along with garlic and ginger, added a can of coconut milk and some pork broth from my freezer, and poached the fish heads in the liquid. Once the fish was done I took it out to pick the meat from the bones, and added some spinach from my garden to the broth. The resulting soup-like concoction was served over basmati rice and topped with chili oil, green onions, and cilantro. (There’s lots of examples of similar dishes out there, but every one I found used cod fillets or something similar - no heads!) The result was vaguely Thai-like in flavor; lemongrass and lime juice would have enhanced that profile, but I didn’t have them on hand.
The entire time I was preparing dinner my husband was hanging around. He tends to be a pickier eater than I am, and I was nervous he would reject the meal if he saw it looking at him first, so I anxiously spent the entire cook obscuring the faces from his view. I handed him his bowl and simply told him we were having fish. (Not a lie.) He tasted it and said it was good, and I breathed a sigh of relief. When he’d finished I asked again what he thought, and he remarked it got a little spicy for him towards the end (he does have a lower heat tolerance than I do) but nothing negative about the fish itself. Only then did I tell him what cut I’d cooked, and thankfully he reacted with curiosity and positivity to that revelation!
In all, it was a surprise, but a success. Would I buy them again? Honestly, probably yes! For less than a dollar and a half, I had enough meat to feed two adults and have leftovers, and that’s hard to beat! But at least next time I won’t be surprised by it.
