Like last year, a fun feature of our holiday in Portugal has been taking advantage of excellent fresh fish. I also know more of the Portuguese names for things so am a little better at ordering than I was previously.

 

We did baked sea bream again this holiday (shown oven ready above with chouriço and garlic stuffed in the slits) but I wanted to try a few more fish that I had never previously cooked.

 

I have previously lamented that our town of 35,000 people has no independent fishmonger though fish counters at both Waitrose and the largest Tesco. At InterMarché in Peniche - which is about the size of our Waitrose and about a quarter of the size of our Tesco - both the fish and meat counters are serious businesses. The above photo shows about half of the fish counter at a quiet lunchtime. On a Saturday morning there were 4 fishmongers fully at work serving & cleaning fish and 30 people ahead of me in the queue.

  

Last year I had often looked at the metre-long cutlassfish and wondered what they would be like grilled. So I went to InterMarché and saw that both cutlassfish and black scabbardfish were on offer; they are both shown on the left of the picture above. Apparently black scabbardfish is only sustainable off the Portuguese coast according the Marine Conservation Society. Although not clear from the picture above the black scabbardfish (while having similar proportions to the cutlassfish) had bigger teeth so looked more interesting.

In the bottom right of the photo there was a fish that was unfamiliar to me. It looked like a seabream in shape but was paler and had a pink tinge - but was not as red as a red snapper. In Portuguese it was described as pargo (this might be red porgy).

I asked for half the black scabbardfish and was told that I had to buy all or nothing. Thankfully the fishmonger spoke English which greatly simplified getting what I needed. She cleaned the pargo and the scabbardfish. I actually fancied grilling the whole scabbardfish head as the mouth with sharp teeth looked cool. However she insisted on cutting off the mouth as the 'teeth are dangerous'!

 

She went on to cut the fish laterally through the backbone in typically iberian style into manageable, though still large, pieces for the barbeque. I was amazed that when grilled the fierce-looking scabbardfish tasted very delicate; though on reflection when we grilled moray eel a year ago it was very delicate too.

The night that we grilled the scabbardfish we also grilled sardines and the pargo. We had a grill where you could not control the airflow so ended up with a hotter grill than was ideal for fish. A lot of oil came out of the sardines when grilling - doubtless healthy fish oils - while the pargo grilled much like a seabream and had a mild but pleasant taste.

 

An iberian holiday would not be complete without Oregano's deep fried squid. Last year we bought about 100 gram squids and did the same on the first visit to the fish counter. Such squids are considerably larger than those I can usually buy at home and are easy to prepare. Later in the holiday considerably larger squids were on offer - approximately 400 grams per squid - at the bargain price of €2.79/kg! 

As you can see from the photo, the squids were as long as the draining board. However the method of tugging the head to extract the innards does not work with these larger squids. The innards were more messy and yucky than smaller ones. In the end I cut through the top of the body and pushed the innards out.

 

After the "yucky bit", I was able to chop the squids up into nice large rings and tentable pieces. The end result was good along with the usual piri-piri and tomato sauce. Nevertheless the practice of cleaning the squid and chopping into rings and tentacles that we had seen at fishcounters in Andalusia has much to commend.