If you don’t know the beau­ty of fried ochro, caraille (may al­so be seen as caraili/caraaili/carail­li or called bit­ter mel­on) and salt­fish then you are miss­ing out on de­li­cious, salty good­ness and quite frankly, most of life.

Salt­fish fried by it­self or with ochro and caraille is an im­me­di­ate cause for drool. It’s salty, flavour­ful and crispy. How­ev­er, there are a few tricks to achiev­ing the per­fect fry, with a gold­en-brown colour and bril­liant crispi­ness and tex­ture. Here are our tried and true tricks for achiev­ing the per­fect fry.

#1 Salt Your Caraille

Most peo­ple don’t like caraille be­cause of its over­pow­er­ing, bit­ter flavour. How­ev­er, due to its rough ex­te­ri­or and tex­ture, caraille crisps up beau­ti­ful­ly if pan-fried. The best and eas­i­est way to rid caraille of its sig­na­ture bit­ter­ness is to salt, squeeze, rinse and squeeze. Salt draws most of the caraille’s wa­ter out (this al­so helps the caraille to crisp). The wa­ter con­tains a lot of the bit­ter­ness from the caraille and thus, im­proves the flavour of the veg­etable. Salt the caraille well, toss it and leave for 20 to 30 min­utes. Then, squeeze the wa­ter out and rinse. Let the caraille dry prop­er­ly and then pro­ceed to fry.

#2 Soak And

Flake Your Salt­fish

Of­ten, salt­fish isn’t pre­pared to its ut­most po­ten­tial. It can ei­ther be too dry, too salty, not salty enough or chun­ked in­stead of flaked. We rec­om­mend soak­ing whole filets in boil­ing wa­ter for 20 to 30 min­utes. Then, us­ing your hands or a fork, flake the fish and then fry. This method re­moves just enough salt and keeps the flavour of the salt­fish while not leav­ing it too salty. Flaked fish, fries much bet­ter than chunks of salt­fish be­cause lit­tle pieces on its sur­face area can crisp up and get gold­en-brown.

#3 Dry Your Ochro

Fried ochro is de­li­cious but one of the ma­jor prob­lems is how slimy it gets at the slight­est hint of mois­ture. Even some­thing as sim­ple as slic­ing ochro with a wet knife can com­plete­ly ru­in your dish or guar­an­tee that you’ll be dry­ing it out on the stove for­ev­er.

We rec­om­mend plac­ing the sliced ochro, cut-side up on a bak­ing sheet and ei­ther dry­ing it in the sun (at least the dry sea­son will be good for some­thing) or at a very low tem­per­a­ture in the oven for a few min­utes. This dries most of the slime in the ochro and en­sures ex­cel­lent crispi­ness of the ochro.

#4 Fry Your

Ochro First

Sim­i­lar to the pre­vi­ous point, mois­ture, even the tini­est bit, can af­fect the prop­er fry­ing of your ochro.

Onions and salt­fish (if adding) con­tain mois­ture and re­lease some of this when it starts saute­ing in oil. We rec­om­mend fry­ing the ochro first in or­der to seal it off from the mois­ture. This guar­an­tees a per­fect­ly brown and crispy fried ochro dish.

#5 Use A Non-Stick Pot And Wood­en Turn­er

Non-stick pots take a lot of the work out of scrap­ing off brown bits from the bot­tom of your pan (and we all know these bits have a tonne of flavour).

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, salt­fish tends to stick a lot to the bot­tom of the pan be­cause of its wa­ter con­tent so, a non-stick pan is the safest route to go.

A wood­en turn­er has a pad­dle shape that makes it ex­treme­ly easy to gen­tly scrape brown bits off the pan.

Its wide edge and wood­en ma­te­r­i­al en­sure that you can quick­ly scrape a lot of sur­face area from the bot­tom with­out dam­ag­ing your pan.