Wild caught butterflied Sea Bream

Sometimes I just love social media. Last Friday I was on my way back home from work and spotted a post from my favorite fishmongers at @monkfish_by_de_graaf

They were showing off their goods and I saw this awesome wild caught sea bream and I knew I had to have it.

Butterflied the beauty and oven grilled it. Served with home made lemon grass sambal over white rice. Here's how I grilled the fish and of course what's in the sambal.

Sambal:

• 2 onions • 3 stalks lemon grass • 5 lime leaves • 2 red chilli peppers • 2 rawit peppers (leave these out if you don't want it spicy) • 5 garlic cloves • thumbsize piece of ginger • thumbsize piece of galangal • 1 tsp white pepper • 1 tsp MSG (sub for a little extra salt and a pinch of sugar) • 1 tsp salt • 2 tbsp light soy sauce • splash of ginger syrup • vegetable oil •

1. Pre-heat your oven at max while you butterfly the fish. If you've never done this before, YouTube is your friend. Take you time for this, you want it to look pretty. You could also ask your fishmonger to do it for you.

2. Chop the lemon grass in super fine rings and the lime leaves is super thin slices. Use a kitchen machine to chop the garlic, galangal, ginger and chillies. Chop the onion super fine by hand.

3. Heat up a frying pan and heat up the vegetable oil. Put all the dry ingredients and the spices in the pan and fry on medium heat. This takes a while. It should get golden.

4. When the oil starts to separate from the other ingredients again, add the soy sauce and ginger syrup. Let simmer on low heat until sticky and not liquidy anymore.

5. Put some salt and pepper on both sides of the fish, put it on grease proof paper on an oven tray and put this as high as possible in your oven so it almost touches the grill at the top. Turn on the grill setting and grill on max for 12 minutes. The skin will bubble and get crispy. The fins might burn, but you probably don't eat those anyway.

6. Serve the fish on a big plate and put some big scoops of the sambal all over it. You could serve the sambal seperate if you don't wanna compromise the crispy skin.

Add fried onions, garlic and/or spring onions to taste.

Serve over white rice.

Enjoy!

❤️🐟🧄🌶🍽