Photo: Obsidian Soul · CC BY-SA 4.0
Inun-unan (Visayan Fish Simmered in Vinegar and Ginger)
A Visayan fish dish from the Philippines: whole fish in a pot with ginger, onion and garlic, covered with vinegar and almost no water, and simmered. No vegetables go in. It is sometimes called "boiled pickled fish" in English.
Ingredients
- small whole fish (sardines, scad, mackerel) · scaled and gutted800 g
- cane or coconut vinegar200 ml
- water60 ml
- ginger · thinly sliced5 cm
- onion · roughly sliced1
- shallots · halved4
- garlic · crushed4 cloves
- black peppercorns1 tsp
- salt1 tsp
- long green chillies · optional2
Steps
- ⏲ 2 min
Lay half the ginger and the onion over the base of the pot.
- ⏲ 3 min
Put the fish on top in one layer and tuck the rest of the ginger, the shallots, garlic, peppercorns and chillies in between. Sprinkle over the salt.
- ⏲ 5 min
Pour in the vinegar and water and bring to the boil uncovered over high heat. Do not stir for the first 2-3 minutes of boiling (chicken adobo).
- ⏲ 15 min
Lower the heat, cover and simmer gently 15 minutes, until the flesh comes off the bone easily. Do not turn the fish.
- ⏲ 1 min
Serve with its broth, over rice.
Variations
- Northern paksiw na isda. The same fish in vinegar, with vegetables such as aubergine or bitter melon and more water.
- With mackerel or milkfish. Larger fish are cut into pieces and cooked the same way.
- Boquerones en vinagre. The Spanish dish that puts the same kind of small fish in vinegar with no heat. There the vinegar does the work cold; here the heat does it.
Tips
- Almost no water. The broth is the vinegar.
- No vegetables. That is what separates it from northern paksiw.
- Ginger is the main spice.
- Do not stir while it cooks. The fish breaks up.
- What separates it from boquerones. In boquerones en vinagre the vinegar does not kill parasites, so the fish has to be frozen first. This dish cooks the fish through, so that rule does not apply. The same fish and the same vinegar, and whether heat goes in decides the safety rule.
More detail and the reasons why (1)
- Why the first minutes go unstirred. Chicken adobo says of the same instruction that "What the still surface buys is a boil left alone at the top of the pot while the sharpest part of the vinegar goes off it." With no water diluting the vinegar here, those minutes matter more.
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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