Rellenong Bangus

Bangus, also known as milkfish, is the Philippines' national fish. Bangus grows in freshwater so I rarely ate it when I was a kid. We didn't have access to bangus at that time, given that I lived in a small island where products from other places rarely reached us. Time has changed everything, though.

My earliest memory of eating bangus was when I was a freshman in the university. I didn't like it that much at first because it is a freshwater fish. It tasted so different from the fishes in my hometown. Slowly, my taste buds got accustomed to the taste of not only bangus, but other freshwater fishes, too.

There are many ways to cook bangus and rellenong bangus is so far the most challenging to prepare.

Ingredients

1 bangus, get the size that would fit your pan
1 onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 small carrot, minced
1 small potato, minced
100 grams raisins
1 raw egg, large
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon soy sauce
2 tablespoons cornstarch
cooking oil for frying
salt and pepper to taste

How to cook

The first step is to separate the fish meat from the skin. This could be very difficult so I didn't do it by myself. I had the local market lady did it for me; free of charge because I bought the bangus from them. After removing the fish meat, wash the skin and marinate it in lemon juice, soy sauce, and worcestershire sauce for at least 30 minutes.

Another difficult task is to remove the fish bones. Bangus has a lot of bones, big and small. What I did was to wash the fish meat, rub a little salt and steamed it until cooked. Removing the bones when the fish has been cooked is less messy.

After removing the bones, we are now ready to mix the meat fish with the other ingredients. Make sure to mix the ingredients well adjusting the amount of spices according to your preference to have a uniform taste of your filling.

Now we're ready to put the filling into the marinated fish skin. Do this slowly, making sure to fill the tail part first. When done putting the filling, we have to close all openings of the fish to make sure the filling doesn't come out while frying the fish. Go get your thread and needle and sew all openings.

Most people deep fry the fish but I don't like it. Deep frying requires a lot of oil and bangus causes a lot of splattering during the process. So if you have a grill pan, I think it's better to use that. I did.

I just had to cook it over low fire to make sure the veggies inside get cooked before the skin gets burnt. I also got a very nice golden brown skin by doing so.