Hi everyone, I am sharing how to make pepes ikan or grilled fish wrapped in banana leaves. It's a very common food in Indonesia. Usually, it is served with steamed rice and vegetables. So, it is not served on its own.
For the fish, you could use tuna, snapper, or any smaller fish.
First, the seasoning ingredients:
- garlic
- onion
- a pinch of salt
- turmeric
- ginger
- chili
- galangal
- lemongrass
- coconut or palm oil
- kecicang or torch ginger or Etlingera elatior
And, you need banana leaves for sure.
First, we cleaned the fish and cut them into small pieces. We also prepared the seasoning. For this, mixed all the seasoning ingredients on a pestle and mortar.
All the seasoning ingredients were ready to be ground.
Grind them until soft.
We added sliced kecicang and lemongrass.
We continued mixed everything.
Finally put a little bit of palm oil.
When the seasoning was ready, we just put the cut fish to mix with it. Next, we wrapped these fish with banana leaves.
We mixed the fish and the seasoning ingredients.
wrapped them in coconut leaves.
We sealed the leaves with "semat" tiny bamboo sticks
They were ready to be steamed.
The next thing we do was to prepare our pan to steam the wrapped fish for about 20 minutes or so.
All the fish wrapped in banana leaves were in the steamer.
we knew it's ready as the leaves color turned darker, and so they were ready.
We took out all the steamed fish from the steaming pan, and prepared the "griller."
10 minutes later we finished grilling the fish. And, that's it, it's done.
We need to unwrap the leaves (you can't eat the leaves 🤣) and our pepes ikan was ready to serve. It tasted quite spicy, but we like spicy food. How about you?