Asian fish cakes with dip!

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To make fish cakes is an excellent way to use frozen fish! Frozen fish tends to be quite dry when you cook it and mixing it up with eggs and flavours hides this. I made me some fish cakes last week and since I still had half a bunch cilantro sitting in my kitchen I went with asian style flavours.

Since the theme was asian I used cocnut cream instead of dairy cream. The coconut cream is the thick stuff in a can of coconut milk with no additatives that you can scoop out if you don’t shake the can before opening. Use the water left in the can for Hot Coconut Eggcocoa.

It doesn’t really matter wich colour the chili has, but red is pretty! You could use dry chili if you wanted. Or even some chriracha sauce!

If you look at my pictures you will se there aren’t any spring onions in my fish cakes. I thought I had some at the house but I was wrong so I had to omit them. But since the recipie is better with the spring onions I include them. I don’t want you to suffer from my cooking mistakes 🙂

The dip sauce is used in different versions all around asia. You can vary it almost to infinity by adding or omitting chili, garlic, use limes, lemons, different kinds of herbs or no herbs at all. This sauce makes more than fish cakes sing. I used the last of mine on a thai omelette for lunch a couple of days later. Use limes or lemons, wichever you prefer or can get your hands on!

Fish cakes with dip, 4 servings

Dip Sauce

Juice from 2-3 limes or lemons
4 tblsp fish sauce
sweetener equivalent to 2 tsp sugar
½ red chili
1 cruched garlic clove
1 small bunch of cilantro

Fish cakes

1 pound, or 400 grams of half thawed frozen white fish
1 small handfull of shrimps (optional)
7 tblsp coconut cream
1 egg
2 garlic cloves or 2 tsp garlic purée
1 piece of fresh ginger, about the size of your thumb
3 spring onions
2 tblsp fish sauce
½ red chili
neutral oil to fry in

Start with the sauce.

Taste your chili and remove all, or parts of, the white on the inside and the seeds to regulate the heat. Slice half of the chili as thinly as you can. Set the other half aside to use in fish cakes later. Add citrus juice, sweetener, fish sauce and garlic. Blend.

Chop the cilantro roughly and stir into the sauce. Taste and ajust flavours to your liking. Set aside when you are happy with the taste.

Now we make the fish cakes.

Cut the fish into pieces and place in a food processor with shrimps, egg, coconut cream, garlic and fish sauce.

Grate the ginger finely, don’t bother to peel. Squeeze the juice of the grated ginger into the processor. Throw away the fiber ball that is left.

Pulse until you have like a dough. It is nice for the texture if there are still whole pieces of fish and shrimp so don’t mix for too long.

Slice the spring onions and chop the chili you have left. Stir into fish mixture.

Shape into small cakes. This is easiest if you wet your hands and the chopping board with water first.

Fry the cakes on a little more than medium temperature in a generous glug of neutral oil. Turn when they are almost done and let them fry on that side for a minute.