Recipes / Fish
Braaied sardines with lemon and garlic oil
Whole fresh sardines brushed with oil, salted and cooked in a hinged grid over hot coals for a few minutes a side, then dressed with lemon and parsley.
- Prep
- 20 min
- On the fire
- 6 min
- Serves
- 4
- Done at
- 145°F (63°C)
Ingredients
Garlic and lemon oil
To serve
Method
Cooking on gas?
- Preheat with all burners on high and the lid closed for 10 to 15 minutes, until the lid thermometer reads 260°C (500°F) or more. Brush the grates clean and oil them.
- Cook with the lid open and use the recipe times as a guide, checking with a thermometer.
- Keep one burner off or on low as a cooler zone. If fat flares up, move the food there. Never use water on a gas grill flare-up.
- For a smoky taste, put a handful of wood chips in a smoker box, or a foil parcel pierced with a few holes, over a lit burner while the grill preheats.
- Rinse the sardines under cold water and rub off any loose scales. Pat them very dry with paper towel.
- Mix the olive oil, garlic, lemon zest and juice, parsley and chilli in a bowl.
- Brush the sardines all over with 2 tablespoons of the garlic oil, then sprinkle them with the salt and pepper on both sides.
- Oil a hinged grid well and lay the sardines in it side by side, head to tail. Close it firmly.
- Cook over hot coals for 2 to 3 minutes until the skin blisters and browns, then turn the grid and cook the second side for 2 to 3 minutes.
- Turn the fish out onto a platter, spoon over the rest of the garlic oil and serve at once with lemon wedges and toast.
Done when: the skin is crisp and blistered, the flesh lifts cleanly off the backbone, and a thermometer pushed into the thickest fish reads 63°C (145°F).
Tips
- Fresh sardines should smell of the sea and have bright eyes. Cook them the day you buy them.
- A hinged grid is the easy way. Loose sardines stick and tear when you try to turn them one by one.
- Eat them with your fingers. The flesh pulls off the bone in two fillets, and the crisp tail is good too.
Every winter huge shoals of sardines move up the KwaZulu-Natal coast in the sardine run, and people wade into the surf with buckets and nets to scoop them up. Portuguese South Africans have always grilled them whole over coals, often on the beach, with salt, lemon and bread. They are cheap, quick and full of flavour. For more on getting fish off the grid in one piece, read braaiing fish.
Source
Adapted from Simple Grilled Sardines at IOL.