It doesn’t taste salty. Really. I was in the “bowels” of the Carbon market this morning and came across these three SUPERBLY fresh and good looking lapu-lapu’s or groupers. At PHP300 a kilo or ($3.00 a pound), they were irresistible. A quick stop to buy 2 kilos of absolutely top quality sea salt for PHP20 or 40 cents, a few chilis, a lemon and some eggs and it was time to make a salt roasted fish…

When seafood looks this good, you don’t need to do much to it at all.

Just clean out the guts of the fish and rinse with some water. I stuffed the cavity with some sliced lemons and chilis. We don’t have an oven in the Cebu office, so I took some aluminum foil, made a bed of salt mixed with egg whites (two egg whites for 2 kilos salt), added some slices of lemon and whole chilis and laid the fish on top. I then covered the entire fish with more lemons, chilis and a lot more salt, taking care to prevent salt from getting into the inner cavities. I then wrapped up the foil and put it over a hot charcoal fire.

At about 1 kilo, this fish took roughly 25 minutes to cook. The bottom part became a hard crust and caramelized/burned a bit. I didn’t have to turnthe package over, and the top crust cracked a bit but the idea was to encase the fish, cook it and steam it in its own juices. The results were delicious. The fish had a dry skin but extremely moist flesh. It really wasn’t salty at all. I am not sure my addition of chilies added anything to the final dish, but it made it look interesting… Some steamed veggies on the side, a bit of olive oil to drizzle over the fish and this is a perfectly healthy and delicious meal.

Note. Photo 1 and 3 taken by A, a crew member. :)

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