Vindaloos have a bad name in this country. And for good reason. Order one in a standard British curry house and you’ll get some diced chicken breast in a dull sauce with a daft amount of chilli powder chucked in. What is that? I have no idea, but let me tell you, it’s not vindaloo.
Real vindaloo, the Catholic Indian dish from Goa, is one of the best curries you can eat: soft pork simmered in a paste of garlic, fragrant spices, a touch of vinegar and, yes, a fair few red chilli peppers. But it doesn’t have to be blisteringly hot; the chillis involved are those long, dried ones, which are normally pretty tame. Unlike curry house ‘vindaloo’, the part they play is as much about colour and flavour as it is heat.
One downside of proper vindaloo is the time it takes to make. You need to marinade the meat overnight, and if you’re using pork shoulder (which you should), it’s going to need simmering for quite a few hours.
The good news is, there’s a stunning Goan fish dish called rechade, which uses a very similar paste, but takes a fraction of the time to make.
I made a version of it the other day, which I served with a crunchy apple and red onion salad, and I’m telling you, it was special. So, next barbeque, you know what to do.
Goan-spiced mackerel with apple and red onion salad
Ingredients
Two whole mackerel, gutted and cleaned
(For the marinade)
6 cloves
6 cardamom seeds (take them out of the pods)
2cm of cinnamon bark
1 teaspoon of black peppercorns
Half a teaspoon of fennel seeds
Half a teaspoon of ground turmeric
A big pinch of salt
6 fat cloves of garlic
6-8 long dried red chillis soaked for 15 mins in warm water and seeds removed
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of sugar
(For the apple salad)
1 Braeburn apple, cored and finely diced
1 small red onion, finely diced
A pinch of salt
Half a small green chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
A handful of finely chopped coriander leaf and stalks
The juice of a lime
Mix the red onion with a pinch of salt and set aside.
Grind the spices in a pestle and mortar, a coffee grinder or whatever you normally use, then add the mix to the rest of the marinade ingredients and blitz in a blender.
Take your gutted and cleaned mackerels and make diagonal slashes in the skin, on both sides, at 2 centimetre intervals.
Massage your marinade into the fish, making sure to get it right inside the cuts.
Next, add the rest of your salad ingredients to your salted onion and mix through.
Now, pan fry – or even better – barbeque your fish on a medium flame for about 5 minutes each side . Don’t worry if it chars a bit, that’s a good thing. Oh, and if you do fry it and there’s any leftover marinade in the pan, make sure you spoon that over the top of the fish.
Serve the mackerel straight away, with the apple salad on the side.
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