Dalmatia: Three recipes from pickled sardines to baked flounder

Heard of 101 Dalmatians? Well here are three – not dogs, though – fish recipes from the coast of Croatia

Time to Split: the city on the Adriatic gives its name to this tuna dish

Split-style tuna (‘Tunjevina na splitski’)

Serves 4

1kg tuna steaks
Olive oil, for drizzling
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Red wine and onion sauce

2 brown onions, thinly sliced
100ml extra virgin olive oil
4 garlic cloves, crushed
500ml good red wine
50ml Varenik or vincotto
50g sultanas

Potato salad

3 whole waxy potatoes, such as desiree, sebago or nicola
½ onion, very thinly sliced
100ml extra virgin olive oil
30ml white
Wine vinegar

This is my modern variation of a very old dish. The original recipe calls to cook the tuna in red wine for 45 minutes. I really love my tuna cooked rare, so I prepare the sauce separately and serve it with rare tuna and potato salad. Tuna is such a good match with red wine and onions, and that’s what makes this dish so delicious. Cut the tuna into 2-3 cm (three-quarter to 1¼ in) thick slices – you should get five to six slices.

For the sauce, sauté the onion in the olive oil for 10-15 minutes on low heat until soft and translucent. Add the garlic and sauté for 5 seconds, then add the wine, varenik and sultanas and boil rapidly until the sauce thickens and has reduced by two thirds. For the potato salad, cook the potatoes in their skins in boiling salted water until soft. Leave them to cool for approximately 10 minutes. While still warm, peel the skins off and cut them into 1 cm (½ in) thick slices. Add the spring onion, olive oil, white wine vinegar and season well.

Preheat a barbecue grill plate or chargrill pan to high. Grill the tuna quickly on the barbecue, for 2 minutes on each side, just to get nice char marks on the outside of the fish, leaving it raw in the middle. Serve the tuna on the potato salad and garnish with the red wine and onion sauce. Drizzle with olive oil and serve.

Varenik recipe

5kg red grapes

Pick the grapes from the stems. Put the grapes through a fruit juicer then strain the juice through a fine-mesh sieve. Put the juice in a large saucepan over high heat and cook until it reduces to one tenth of its original volume, or until the juice becomes a syrup and starts to foam. You should have about 500ml of varenik. Allow to cool.

Baked flounder (‘Peceni iverak’)

Serves 4

4 flounder, 300-400g each
1 loaf of day-old bread
150ml extra virgin olive oil
1 whole lemon, plus extra
Lemon wedges to serve
1 garlic clove, crushed
15g chopped
Flat-leaf (Italian) parsley
Sea salt
Freshly ground black
Pepper

Flounder is a great fish to bake in the oven. It is much more suited to this cooking method than grilling because of its flat shape and delicate flesh. You can also braise it in a large pan with tomato or some shellfish. It’s a really easy fish to eat because it doesn’t contain many small bones. This recipe includes bread, which gives it a bit of crispiness and is a great companion to the sweet flavour of the flounder. You will need two roasting trays or tins to bake the four flounder. Serve with a salad or steamed vegetables.

Wash and gut the fish. Cut around the head with a sharp knife and push your fingers under the skin to peel it off – it should come off easily in one piece. You can also peel the white skin off the bottom of the fish, but it’s not essential.

Cut the crusts off the bread and cut the bread into 2 cm (¾ in) cubes. Place the bread in a food processor with all the remaining ingredients and blend into coarse crumbs. Season with salt and pepper. The mixture should taste nice and lemony. Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F).

Place the fish on two baking trays. Season the flounder well and spread the bread mixture evenly over each fish. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until the crust on the top is crispy. Serve with the lemon wedges for squeezing over the fish.

Marinated and pickled sardines (‘Marinada od srdela i ukiseljene srdele’)

For thousands of years sardines have been a staple food of the Croatian coastal region. In Dalmatia, we eat them frequently during the hot summer months. Marinated sardines can keep in the refrigerator for a number of weeks. They make a perfect, quick-to-prepare meal if you have unexpected guests, or are excellent served as an appetiser. I learned this pickled sardine recipe from our neighbour in Split when I lived there as a child.

Pickled sardines with red relish salad

Serves 8

2kg whole fresh sardines
300g  coarse sea salt
1 litre
White vinegar (not white wine vinegar)
100g sugar
Vegetable oil (sunflower or cottonseed)

Red radish salad

5 red radishes, finely diced
1 tomato, cored and finely diced
3 spring onions, thinly sliced

Dressing

50ml extra virgin olive oil
30ml red wine vinegar
10ml Varenik

For the sardines, scale and gut them with a small knife – cut the heads off and pull the guts out. Quickly wash the sardines and dry them with a clean tea towel (dish towel). In a colander, mix the cleaned sardines with the coarse salt and leave to cure for 2 hours. Rinse the sardines and place them in a plastic or glass container. Mix the vinegar with the sugar and pour the mixture into the container with the sardines. Make sure all the sardines are submerged in the vinegar.

Leave to marinate for 24 hours. The following day, take the sardines out of the vinegar and, using your fingers, gently butterfly them and pull the middle bone out, leaving only the tail. Arrange the sardines in layers in a glass container with an airtight lid and pour the vegetable oil over each layer of the sardines. They should be well-covered in oil. Seal the container and store in the refrigerator. They will last for a long time sealed but, once opened, keep refrigerated and eat within a week.

To serve, take the sardines out of the oil, remove any excess oil and arrange them on a serving plate. For the radish salad, mix all the ingredients together and sprinkle on top of the sardines with the dressing.

‘Dalmatia’ by Ino Kuvačić, published by Hardie Grant, is out now, priced £20 Photography © Chris Middleton and Ino Kuvačić