Couscous di pesce (Fish Couscous)

Frank18 August 2018mains/secondi piatti, Sicilia41 Comments

On my recent trip to western Sicily for a family wedding, I tasted many delicious dishes, but none was more distinctive than the couscous di pesce, also known as couscous alla trapanese after the city and province of Trapani in western Sicily where it’s from. The fact that Sicilians eat couscous is a legacy of the Moorish rule over the island in the early Middle Ages. But while in the Maghreb couscous is typically eaten with lamb and vegetables, in Trapani it is accompanied by a spicy fish soup made with the bountiful local seafood.

I had couscous di pesce twice during the trip, once at a dockside restaurant in Castellamare del Golfo and once at a farewell dinner for the happy couple at the home of our hosts on the last night of the trip. On that second occasion zio Piero—who had prepared the dish entirely from scratch—was kind enough to explain to me how he made his version of this iconic local dish.

This streamlined version of Piero’s recipe essentially cuts out the most laborious and time-consuming part of the process—making and steaming the couscous—by using pre-cooked couscous. You can put this version on your table in less than an hour, instead of the five or more it takes to make the dish entirely from scratch. Is pre-cooked couscous as good as the homemade version? Not quite, but it comes surprisingly close. And the soul of the dish— the fish soup—is as exquisite as ever.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

For the fish soup:

1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 medium carrot, finely chopped
1 stalk of celery, finely chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
A few sprigs of parsley, finely chopped
A pinch of red (chili) pepper flakes
Olive oil, q.b.
250-300ml (1 to 1-1/2 cup) passata di pomodoro, preferably homemade
1-1.5 kilo (2-3 lbs) mixed firm-fleshed fish (preferably bone-in) and shellfish (see Notes for details)
A few threads of saffron (optional)
A bay leaf

For the coucous:

250g-300g (9 to 10-1/2 oz) pre-cooked or regular packaged couscous
A handful of almonds, chopped
A pinch of ground cinnamon
A pinch of ground nutmeg

Directions

Step 1: Prepare the fish soup

In a pot large enough to contain all your seafood comfortably, sauté the onion, carrot, celery, parsley, garlic and red pepper flakes in abundant olive oil over low heart until quite soft. Add a pinch of salt as you sauté, taking care not to let anything brown.

Add the tomatoes to the pot and let them reduce for a few minutes into a saucy consistency.

Lay on the fish and other seafood, then add enough water to cover the seafood, along with the bay leaf and saffron if using. Simmer, uncovered, for a good 20-30 minutes, until the seafood is cooked through and broth is very flavorful. Taste and adjust for salt.

Remove the fish and other seafood from the pot. Using a paring or boning knife, remove the skin and filet the fish. Cut the filets, if need be, into serving-size pieces. Place the fish filets and shellfish in a bowl and cover to keep warm. Discard the fish heads, skin and bones.

Pour the remaining broth through a fine sieve, pressing out the liquid from the solids, and return it to the pot, along with the seafood.

Step 2: Make the couscous:

If you are using pre-cooked couscous, you should follow the measurements and instructions on the package, but using the fish broth or a 50/50 combination of broth and water instead of water. Generally speaking, the instructions will tell you to add pre-cooked couscous to hot liquid and allowed to steam off heat.

Bring the required amount of liquid to a boil, add the precooked couscous, together with the chopped almonds and spices, give it all a good stir and cover. Let the couscous stand for a good 5 minutes, or until the broth is fully absorbed and the couscous tender. Once the couscous is cooked, fluff it with a fork.

Step 3: Assemble and serve:

When you are ready to serve, bring the broth back to the barest simmer to reheat the seafood.

For a family style presentation, serve the couscous in a large serving bowl, perhaps topped with more chopped almonds and a few pieces of seafood, with the fish soup in a separate soup terrine. Each diner can take a portion of couscous, and top it with the seafood and a good ladleful of the borth, to their taste. For a fancier presentation, you can plate individual servings as pictured here.

Notes on Couscous di pesce

Ideally, the fish you use for a couscous di pesce will be whole fish with bones and head, which give more taste to the broth. The heads and bones are then removed as indicated above. This is probably the trickiest part of the whole recipe, as you need to gingerly scrape off the skin without damaging the flesh—it should actually come off quite easily—and then lift the fillets underneath off the bone, again ideally without damaging the flesh. It’s not all that difficult, but it does take some time and care. I think it’s well worth the effort.

Even so, whole fish can be a challenge to find in some US markets, where fish is increasingly sold in pre-cut fillets. If that’s all you can find, do try to beg off a fish head or two from your fish monger. Add them to the pot to simmer along with the fish, then discard them. They will lend the broth a lot of extra flavor.

The measurements in this recipe are based on Piero’s description during dinner but involving a fair amount of semi-educated guesswork on my part. As is usually the case for iconic dishes like this one, recipes are all over the map. The amount of fish can be varied according to tastes and your appetites; some recipes call for double the seafood called for here, others less. Ditto for the amount of tomato, which varies wildly from recipe to recipe, with some quite ‘red’ and others calling for just a hint of hint of tomato. Some recipes call for passata di pomodoro as here, others for tomato concentrate. Piero said he uses chopped tomatoes, fresh in the summer and canned in the off season.

Tips from zio Piero

Zio Piero makes his couscous by hand, steaming it for a good two hours. While the couscous is steaming, he prepares the fish soup. He then transfers the steamed couscous to a large terracotta bowl, called a mafaràdda, mixing the steamed couscous with a generous portion of the fish broth. He lets the couscous rest, covered, for a hour, to absorb the broth, then repeats the process twice more, producing a very flavorful, deep red couscous, as pictured below. The whole process, Piero told me, takes five hours. It’s definitely a labor of love!

Apologies for the quality of the cellphone photo, but trust me, the couscous was red..!

Making the Fish Soup

Piero’s fish soup included a long list of local fishes that I neglected to jot down. But I do remember it included both grouper (cernia) and rockfish (scorfano). The soup was mostly fish, but most recipes for couscous di pesce include all sorts of seafood including squid, shrimp and mussels. Langoustines like the ones that topped Piero’s mound of couscous would be lovely, too, if you can find them. In any event, as with most fish soups, you can use what the fishmonger has on offer that day. I used branzino, as my fishmonger didn’t have grouper or rockfish that day. Whatever fish you use should be firm-fleshed, so it doesn’t fall apart in the cooking. This is especially important because, as you may have noticed, the cooking time for the soup is fairly long.

As a result, the fish itself turns out a bit overcooked, at least to my taste, but as Piero pointed out, the real point is enriching the broth to flavor the couscous. The fish itself is secondary. But if you want better textured seafood at the cost of a slightly less tasty broth, you can add the fish in phases, starting with the seafood that takes the longest—like the squid—then the whole fish, perhaps about 10 minutes later, and then the most delicate items like the shrimp about 5 minutes before the soup is done, leaving the mollusks like mussels to the very end, cooking them for only the minute or two it takes for them to open.

Making Couscous by Hand

Piero gave me only a fleeting description of how he made the couscous itself. A chef can’t reveal all his secrets, after all! But he did mention that he formed the couscous by rubbing the dough with both hands, as if he were washing them, not by working it against the bottom of a bowl or other surface as many people do. But generally speaking, homemade couscous involves a process call l’incocciàta in Sicilian. You sprinkle water on coarsely ground semolina flour (semola) and work it into the flour with your hands in a circular motion, sprinkling more water as needed until small grains are formed. You then drizzle the grains with olive oil to keep them separate, along with other flavorings. (NB: In some recipes, the order is reversed, with the oil added first, then the water.) This video (in Italian) demonstrates the technique rather well, I think.

Castellammare del Golfo where I first tried the dish

Using Packaged Uncooked Couscous

There’s a middle ground between pre-cooked couscous and making you own by hand: packaged but uncooked couscous, often imported from Morocco or another of the Maghreb countries. As for pre-cooked couscous, should you once again follow the instructions. But generally speaking, this kind of couscous will require steaming over salted water, after which, for this recipe, you transfer the steamed couscous to a large bowl, then moisten it with a few ladlefuls of the fish broth. You then let the seasoned couscous stand for 30 minutes or more, to allow the flavors to meld.

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