Forum

I was excited to get some mackerel today. (I live in Charleston SC and while we have great seafood, we don't EVER get fresh mackerl!). I looked in EYB for ideas, and found the most curious thing when using "mackerel" as the primary search term. Of course, I got lots of recipes with the fish, but I also got some for salt mackerel and a few that called for either aji amarillo peppers or jalapeños.

First of all, does anyone know how to select just for fresh mackerel? Here's some of what I tried, searching against the entire library (not just my small collection):

Searching for salt+mackerel gives only recipes with salt (or salted) mackerel.

Searching for fresh+mackerel or "fresh mackerel" gives 4 recipes, while fresh mackerel gives 39.

Using just the word mackerel gets you 895 recipes. Use "only show" to exclude all fish and there are still 73 recipes, most of which have some kind of "aji" or "aji" in their name (and some of which are labelled as sauces for mackerel), but some of which only have some kinds of peppers in them, usually with "aji" in the pepper name.

Second, can anyone tell me why some peppers are also coming up along with the mackerel? (I am fascinated by the many different names -- just in English -- for ingredients).

Thanks!

I can tell you that the point of overlap is the word aji, which is a Japanese word for horse mackerel, as well as a term used in South America and the Caribbean for a type of capsicum that is native to South America.

What did you decide to do with your (fresh) mackerel?

The important thing to get across here is that the word search box is exactly that - a word search.  It looks for the word you enter in recipe name, ingredients, book title and author name.  So it really is a very broad search and it will find the word you enter in lots of ways you cannot anticipate like alternative ingredient names.  As schambers points out there are alternative ingredient names which will throw out results that are not obvious.

So it is far better to use the very precise Only Show filters which will match the word to the precise entry in the database.  So if you want to find the fish mackerel then enter the Only Show filters Ingredient / Fish & seafood / Oily fish / Mackerel. That will only show the fish you are looking for, not the word mackerel that can pop up in unexpected places.

The reason we compile a database of ingredients and categories is so we can be very precise.  Google, Bing etc are just word searches.  A database is much more precise as it looks for the exact match that we have entered, not a broad sweep search by word.  This is a lot more work for EYB in terms of data entry but it makes our searches a lot more useful if it is used in the right way.

I love the power of the EYB database.I also love the serendipitous discoveries that you make when you find that various different ingredients have overlapping names! 

I did finally figure out how to get recipes with salt mackerel. Search on mackerel and set Only Show to exclude Ingredients/Fish/Oily Fish/Mackerel. Is there a more direct way to do this, using Only Show to include salt mackerel?

schambers, I found a recipe in Ferran Adrià's The Family Meal for a mackerel and potato stew, described as a traditional Catalan suquet. Easy and delicious. And a gorgeous and interesting book. However, the layout of all of the recipes in this book follow a strict plan. Each recipe is are displayed across two pages with a photo for every step (15 photos per recipe); the instructions are printed in a bubble within each photo. Thus, all the recipes have to be either compressed or extended into 15 steps. The recipes give quantities for 2, 6, 20, and 75 (which is useful!) and a lot of the photos were clearly shot using some of the larger quantities, which might be a little disconcerting if not downright misdirection.  (This particular recipe has a shot of enough mackerel for 75 being seasoned - great photo! - and a picture of grated tomatoes draining that clearly had more than the 1 1/2 tablespoon of tomatoes that the version I was making "for 2" called for! That photo made me recheck the tomato quantity twice - after all, how many recipes do you encounter that call for such a small quantity of tomatoes?) My personal preference is for words not pictures in recipes. In any case, I'm definitely heading back to the store for more mackerel!!   And three cheers for EYB because it was so easy to find just the recipe I needed!!

Just a note on the salt fish issue:  Remember that you can use almost any recipe for salt fish using fresh!  The texture may a bit different, as salt fish can be tougher and chewier (even after soaking to remove the salt) but you'll still get delicious results!  That's certainly true for salt cod, for which there are thousands of recipes!