Fish fry
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Fish fry is the most famous sea food side dish for us. When compared to crab and prawns, there are more people like fish. Fish must be bought fresh to enjoy the great taste of fish.
For this recipe, we bought fish directly from a fisherman in Chennai - ECR.
The fish is called Kaalan in Tamil language.
Check out fish dictionary for the meaning in English/other languages
Fish fry is a easy to do side dish which is delicious and adds a great taste to the meal.
Let us see tradional way of making Fish fry here. We use the term "fry" more commonly to denote the tamil word "varuval".
Ingredients
To fry
- Your choice of fish - 500 gms
- Turmeric powder - 1/2 tstp
- Fennel powder - 1/2 tstp
- Sambar powder - 4 tstp
- Red Chilli powder - 2 tstp
- Onion optional - 1/4 of an onion
- Garlic optional - 3 cloves
Preparation
1
Prepare the fish for frying.
Clean and cut the pieces in water. Remove the fish head. You can use fish head for making fish kuzhambu.
Optionally you can add little bit of crushed onion and garlic for additional masala taste.
The amount of onion and garlic to be used depends on the amount of fish. For above quantity of fish, we have taken 2 cloves of garlic and 1/4th of onion. See below image for details.
Put peeled garlic and chopped onions
and crush
2
Add all the masala powder as mentioned in the ingredients section. Optionally you can add the crushed onion and garlic from Step-1.
and Mix them.
You can keep some fish to fry on a later day. You can pack the mixed fish in a air-tight box (or cover with a wrap) and keep in the freezer.
3
Heat the fry pan before adding oil.
Then add oil
Note the total oil added.
This is very important.
If you add too much of oil then fish will get deep fried and you will not be able to taste the juicy flesh/meat of the fish.
4
Once the oil is hot, start adding fish we prepared in Step 2.
Fill the pan with fish. Note not to overload.
5
In Step 4, ensure you fry both sides. Approximately you should fry for 10 min both sides. Then take the fish and serve in a plate.
Fish fry closeup.
Animation of Fish Fry: For this fish fry animation, we used Kizhanga meen - Lady fish in English. Check out more fish names in English / Japanese and Tamil here.
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Popular main dish for Fish fry includes:
Vegetarian main dish:
Sambar, Kuruma, Rasam
Fish fry goes well with almost all main dishes.
Non-Vegetarian main dish:
Chicken kuruma, Mutton Kuruma
Other dishes with Fish as main ingredient:
Fish Kuzhambu, Fish shioyaki
Other names/spelling variations of Fish fry:
Meen varuval, Mean varuval, Sakana fry