I have been lucky enough to do quite a bit of traveling in the last couple months. First back to my home province of Sichuan and most recently to the Greek island of Crete to teach a photography workshop and so this little space has been woefully neglected. I am working on recaps of these two trips along with posts for my trip last year to New South Wales, Australia and New Zealand’s South Island. Every time I make a large dent in the seemingly endless number of photos, I have to stop for one reason or another. When I come back to them weeks later with fresh eyes, I am almost never 100% satisfied with the way they look. I doubt myself, I berate myself and I look for perfection where probably there never will be. In short, I am so very behind. It is and will always continue to be a learning process. And really that is what I love about photography. But I have so many wonderful memories to share and so I must come to a point of satisfaction with my photos. A trip to Italy is fast approaching (any places I must go to North of Rome?) and so if I don’t get some posts up soon, I will be even more behind. I’m finishing up with the Greece trip so that will be first.

But first, I have been waiting for tomato season to share with you this delicious recipe that will be on repeat in my kitchen while juicy, sweet tomatoes grace us with their presence during these summer months. I was even making this dish to great success when tomatoes were horribly out of season. Shhh… don’t tell the seasonal food police that I buy tomatoes in the winter time.

Please don’t be intimidated by the list of ingredients in this recipe. If you have been reading this site for a while, you may have noticed that I love spices and that I only cook with whole spices. I have been cooking with whole spices for many years now, but before this I had the usual small collection of standard ground spices. This almost always hindered me from exploring recipes that I found the most interesting. Now that I have built up my collection, I am no longer intimidated and the grinding step isn’t even something that really strains my mind. And man does it make a difference. The whole spices keep for so much longer than ground spices. If you are looking to up your cooking game, this is such a tiny but powerful step to take. I think you will also find, as I did, a whole new world of cooking that I previously didn’t dare to try. So while this recipe may look intimidating, with a properly stocked spice cabinet, it really should take you under an hour to put this curry on the dinner table.

I LOVE a good travel and food show; my two favorite subjects combined with usually a horribly out of place chef leading us through the rough and tumble markets and the amazing variety of cuisines around the world. One of my favorites is a series of shows by British chef, Rick Stein. If you haven’t seen his shows, you must check them out. While he is definitely a bumbling white dude, super terribly out of place, he truly does respect the food of the countries that he travels to and I always learn so much. In his Far Eastern Odyssey, Rick travels to Sri Lanka and at one point watches a fisherman’s wife make a fish curry. Can you think of better person to learn fish curry from. This combined with my recent trips to a wonderful Sri Lankan restaurant here in NYC inspired me to make this dish when Australis Barramundi asked me to create a series of recipes for them. You can see the rest of the series below.

1. Creole Courtbouillon
2. Barramundi Ssam

While watching the fisherman’s wife make her simple curry, I learned about two techniques that are often used by South Asian cooks to build multi-dimensional flavor. The first is they often grind up tomatoes, peppers, onion, garlic, and spices to make a wet curry paste. The second is something called tempering. In addition to the ground spices in the curry paste, whole spices are fried in hot oil until they are popping and super fragrant. To this wonderfully aromatic oil and spices, onion are usually added for browning, or this oil is often used to finish off a dish as a final grand flourish of flavor. Both techniques are used here in this recipe to make a dish truly fearless in flavor.

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S R I  L A N K AN   T O M A T O  F I S H   C U R R Y
serves 4

1 20-24 oz filet of barramundi fish, cut into large 1 1/2 inch chunks
2 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorn
3 large tomatoes, sliced
2 medium red onion, thinly sliced
1 inch nub ginger, peeled and sliced
4 cloves garlic,  peeled and diced
5 green bird’s eye chilies
2 teaspoon salt
4 green cardamoms, lightly crushed to open the pods
1 cinnamon stick, snap into pieces
15-20 fresh curry leaves
1 cup coconut milk
1 tablespoon pure tamarind pulp

In a mixing bowl, gently mix the fish with 1 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon turmeric. Set aside while you prepare the other ingredients.

Using a mortar and pestle or the back of a heavy pan, grind 1 teaspoon mustard seed, 1/4 teaspoon cumin seeds, and 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorn. Combine half a tomato, 1 red onion, the ginger, 2 cloves of garlic, the chilies, the ground spices, and 1 teaspoon salt in a food processor, and grind to a thick paste. Set aside.

Temper the spices: Add a thin layer of oil to a wok or dutch oven, heat the pan over high heat until hot.Turn the heat down to medium, add the rest of the whole mustard seeds, cumin seeds, black peppercorn, green cardamom, and cinnamon. Cook the spices until they are super fragrant and turned darker. The mustard seeds and cumin will start to pop in the oil. Allow them to pop a bit, be very careful the spices do not burn.

Once the spices are done tempering, add the onions, the rest of the diced garlic, and the turmeric. Bring the heat back up to medium high. Cook for 8-10 minutes until they have softened and colored. Pour the paste that was made earlier into the pan and cook, stirring constantly, for 5-8 minutes. Add the sliced tomatoes and cook for 10 minutes. Add 1 1/4 cup of water, the curry leaves, and rest of the salt, bring up to a boil, turn the heat down to a simmer and cook the tomatoes down for another 10-15 minutes. Add the coconut milk.  Gently slide the fish, skin-side up into the pan. With both hands, pick up the pan and Using a gentle swirling motion to mix the contents of the pan around. Rather than use a spatula, this technique keeps the delicate fish from breaking. Bring back up to a boil and then turn the heat down to a simmer. Cook just until the fish is opaque. Finally mix in the tamarind and turn of the heat.

Serve immediately with rice.

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This post was done in collaboration with Australis Barramundi. All opinions expressed here are my own.

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