Chris De La Rosa of CaribbeanPot.com show you a very easy recipe with fresh sardines, well seasoned and roasted to perfection in a moderate oven until tender and juicy, and then crisped up on a high oven for a few minutes.
Ingredients
6 sardines (about 0.5 kg)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil (divided)
1 or 2 spring onions (scallions)
2 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 cloves garlic
1 lemon
3-5 birds eye peppers (or any other peppers – optional)
Method
Terry will scale, clean and gut your sardines. Cut two shallow slits at the thickest parts of the belly (both sides). This will help the flavours to really penetrate.
Finely chop the spring onions (scallions), garlic and parsley. If you’re concerned about the raw heat from the bird’s eye pepper (say bird pepper in the Caribbean), you can leave them whole and the natural oils from the skin will be released as they roast in the oven.
Drizzle a bit of the olive oil on the bottom of your roasting pan, then place the sardines and the other ingredients. Mix well. Take half the lemon and squeeze the juice over and the rest of the olive oil. Slice the rest of the lemon an place the slices between the fish as well. Allow this to marinate for about 15 minutes.
Preheat your oven to 375F (190C) and then place the baking pan on the middle rack. Roast for 10 minutes.
To really intensify the flavours, turn up the oven to maximum about 500F (250C) and give it another 4-5 minutes. Then get ready to enjoy an amazing gluten free, fish dish.
You can do these on your grill, or if you wanted you can even dust then in flour and fry in vegetable oil until crisp. Remember if you’re doing the fried version it will NOT be gluten free unless you use a gluten free flour.