Saltfish or Shark: Trini Fried Bakes

A few years ago, in the before times, Mindy and I had traveled to New Jersey to try the New Jersey style Sloppy Joe sandwich–a completely different Sloppy Joe than the one you grew up with, unless you happened to grow up in that particular area of New Jersey. Having achieved our goal for that trip–and having enjoyed the Sloppy Joes we had at Town Hall Deli–we took the opportunity for a side trip into New York City, traversing lower Manhattan into Brooklyn and making our way to A&A Bake & Doubles shop in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

To dial the wayback machine further yet–a few years before, I had written about the Trinbagonian street food Doubles, which consists of chana masala, or chickpea curry, served with various chutneys and sauces with 2 deep-fried flatbreads called bara. The dish had captured my imagination, and when I read in the lead-up to our New Jersey trip that this small carryout storefront had been named an American Classic by the James Beard Foundation, it was not difficult to talk Mindy into making this a secondary objective of our trip.

I of course ordered the Doubles, which I’d been thinking about since writing about them a few years earlier. Photogenic they are not–nearly every picture I’ve ever seen of doubles looks like a dirty diaper–but they were delicious, an aromatic stew of chickpeas seasoned with tamarind chutney and hot sauce and served in these soft, turmeric-tinted fried flatbreads.

I also ordered a roti stuffed with curry goat. The goat curry was bone-in, which made this less effective as a burrito-style wrap, but the roti did make a terrific edible wrapper for the goat curry. By the time we made our way back to our hotel hours later and finished the curry, the roti had absorbed much of the fragrant and fatty turmeric-yellow sauce that clung to the goat bones, and made a satisfying midnight snack on its own. I liked this roti so much that I attempted to recapture it to some extent with a dhalpuri roti of my own a while later.

Mindy, who always does a better job than me of researching the highest-rated items on any restaurant’s menu before we ever go, had her order on lock before we even got on a plane–she ordered bake with saltfish. Bake, or “fry bake” as it’s sometimes called (to differentiate it from a bake that is merely… baked), is a fried flatbread common in Trinidad and Tobago as well as Guyana, Saint Lucia, and Grenada. It is similar to “Indian frybread” or more closely to the Bokit of Guadaloupe. It is usually chemically leavened rather than yeast-risen and deep-fried in oil, inflating the dough and creating open pockets within the bread into which various fillings can be placed.

Saltfish

Bakes are often eaten for breakfast in Trinidad and Tobago, and saltfish–salted cod or bacalao–is the most common filling.

Bacalao is preserved with salt, and dried, making it inedibly salty as-is. Before serving, it is either soaked for a few days in cold water with at least one change of water to remove the salt, or simply boiled with multiple water changes for a quicker prep. Trinbagonians may simply flake the boiled fish and serve it in a bake alone or with tomatoes but a more common preparation for stuffing into a breakfast bake is the saltfish buljol. Some recipes I saw called for the vegetables to be sauteed and some did not. I chose to make my version more salad-like, adding the vegetables and a dressing of blended olive oil, lime juice, garlic, and Scotch bonnet pepper to the still-warm simmered and flaked saltfish.

Fried Bake

Of the dozen or so recipes I reviewed before attempting to fry my own bakes, only one included yeast. Another mentioned yeast but the recipe creator preferred using baking powder. I chose to use this recipe from Caribbean recipe site Alica’s Pepperpot, which make enough for 12 bakes.

I fried these in a fry daddy that doesn’t quite get up to 375° F anymore–closer to 355°–and so they didn’t take on as much color as I’d have liked, but the few that I did fry to a more golden brown color had too crisp a finish. The bakes should be soft and flexible.

Spooning hot oil over the bakes as they fry helps get the centers to puff up, which makes it easier to cut these open and stuff them as intended.

The resulting bread is thin-walled with a large open air chamber, or several, between the top and bottom crust. The thinness of the bready parts results in a fairly high crust-to-crumb ratio, making them chewier than they are soft. This fried bake is technically I suppose a doughnut. I cannot recommend doughnut sandwiches in general, though we have enjoyed some specific types in the past.

Condiments

When Mindy ordered this sandwich at A&A, it came with salt fish and little or nothing else, though A&A had an arsenal of chutneys and sauces at hand. Some descriptions of Bake and Saltfish describe only tomatoes adorning the boiled, flaked fish. Many others call for lettuce and tomato, a few for avocado.

Yet I know from my previous experience with Doubles that Trinbagonian cuisine features a wide variety of excellent condiments. There was the tamarind sauce, that spicy Matouk’s Hot Pepper Sauce made with Scotch Bonnet peppers, and Ranette’s recipe for cucumber chutney that impressed me so much.

Call it confirmation bias if you wish, but I kept looking for a more thorough listing of potential condiments for bakes until I found one. The Trini Bake and Shark recipe on the site Classic Bakes gave me what I needed. It lists the following as optional salad components: “lettuce, tomatoes, ketchup, sliced pineapple and shredded cabbage.” It then goes on to list these potential condiments: “pepper sauce, tamarind sauce, garlic sauce, mustard, chadon beni sauce, pepper sauce, and cucumber chutney.”

Ah, pepper sauce. The condiment so nice they listed it twice. Of course I will go with Matouk’s again, which packs a good amount of both heat and flavor. I tried a different tamarind sauce recipe this time, as well as making a garlic and chadon beni (culantro) sauce from this recipe (though I replaced half the mayonnaise with some toum to give it additional garlicky character). And yes, I made Ranette’s cucumber chutney recipe again, this time using actual culantro or chadon beni rather than the cilantro substitute I had to resort to last time.

Bake and Saltfish

To make bake with saltfish, we start by splitting open a bake along once side, leaving a hinge on the other. The ones that puffed most completely during frying are the easiest to split open this way.

Atop a base of cucumber chutney

I scoop in a solid layer of saltfish buljol

and top it with tamarind sauce.

Then shredded lettuce

dressed with the garlic/chadon beni sauce.

In all the excitement, I forgot to add Matouk’s. I’ll be sure to put it on the next one.

Mindy came to me after eating one of these and told me it was the best fish sandwich she’d ever had. I can’t disagree. The saltfish buljol tastes much like a ceviche, with the citrus dressing against the sweetness of tomato and bell pepper and the pungency of the onions and culantro. The fresh, herbaceous cucumber chutney also brightens the sandwich, as does the lime/garlic/culantro punch of the garlic sauce. The fish, its former saltiness removed by soaking, centers the melange of flavors, providing a protein to anchor them, a chew to the texture, a flavor that is omnipresent and unmistakably fish without overwhelming.

Bake and Shark

The other popular usage of fry bakes, bake and shark, is somewhat problematic. Many shark species are currently considered vulnerable or endangered due to overfishing. In Trinidad and Tobago, sharks are often caught incidentally while fishing other species, but are brought in and sold anyway due to their popularity as street food.

I did not know all this when I started researching this sandwich, but I am glad to report that I was unable to find shark of any kind when shopping for fish. Instead, I picked up some grouper–a fish that was also once endangered due to overfishing but has resurged in recent years–to act as a shark stand-in.

The fish filets are soaked in water and lemon juice for a few hours, then rubbed with salt and “green seasoning,” a mixture of scallions and herbs. With this slather still clinging to the flesh, they are quickly breaded and fried and then served i bakes similarly to the saltfish.

As with any fish, the trick to cooking “shark”–or grouper or catfish or whatever shark substitute you are using–is not to overcook it. My fryer runs a bit on the cool side so I did not get as much color as I’d have liked, but the breading was crisp and the flesh inside was bursting with moisture.

This time I did remember to add Matouk’s Hot Pepper Sauce, so for the first few bites that flavor dominated, the sour and fruity fermented scotch bonnet along with the comparatively subtle bite of mustard. As I became accustomed to the heat of the sauce though, I was able to concentrate on the sandwich as a whole. The other flavors were present– the sweet and sour tamarind mingling with the hot and pungent Matouk’s, the bright and herbaceous cucumber chutney and garlic / chadon beni sauces bookending a sandwich that was much more centered on the fish, these crisp, hot planks of fried grouper topped. Iceberg lettuce was an afterthought in this scenario, a bit of wet vegetation that perhaps wanted a few thin slices of tomato to keep it company.

The fish was great though. I’d make it again, perhaps with catfish next time. It could stand on its own as well as it does in this sandwich. In any case, as good as this sandwich was, the bake with saltfish was better, the fish salad providing balance that the fried grouper did not.