Shutki in Sydney: Five Dried Fish and How to Cook Them

Shutki divides a household faster than any other food in it.

The people who grew up with it will tell you the smell is the point. The people who did not will leave the building. Both positions are reasonable, and anyone cooking it in a unit already knows which side their neighbours are on.

What it is

Shutki is fish dried in the sun until almost all the water is gone. No refrigeration, no preservative, just salt, air and time. It is one of the oldest ways of keeping fish there is, and in Bengal it predates anything else by a long way.

Drying does not just preserve the fish. It concentrates it. The flavour goes somewhere a fresh fish never goes, which is why shutki is not a substitute for fresh fish and nobody treats it as one. It is its own thing.

The five on the shelf

Dry Keski, $4.99. The gentle one, and the place to start. Small, mild by shutki standards, and forgiving if you overdo the soaking.

Dry Chepa, $4.99. Fermented as well as dried, which puts it a long way up the scale. Not a first attempt.

Dry Lotia, $7.99. Stronger than keski, and the one a lot of people consider the proper benchmark.

Dry Ribbon Fish, suri shutki, $11.99. Long, flat, firm. Holds its shape through a long cook, so it suits a dish with more going on around it.

Asia Balachang, $9.99. A paste rather than a whole fish. Used in small amounts as a base, not as the body of the dish.

All five are in the dry fish collection.

The order that matters

Three steps, and the order is the part people get wrong.

Soak it. Warm water, twenty to thirty minutes for keski, longer for the firmer ones. This softens it and pulls out a good deal of the salt.

Rinse it twice. Properly, in fresh water each time. This is the step that gets skipped and it is the difference between a dish that tastes of fish and one that tastes only of salt.

Dry fry it before anything else goes in the pan. No oil. Just the fish, in a hot dry pan, until it colours slightly and smells toasted. Then take it out, start your onions and chillies, and bring it back in.

Dry frying first is what separates a good shutki dish from a flat one. It wakes the fish up. Skip it and you are essentially boiling dried fish in a masala.

Cooking it without clearing the house

Window open. Kitchen door shut. That part is not optional.

The smell travels, and it stays in soft furnishings. Shutting the kitchen door matters more than opening the window does, because what you are trying to do is stop it reaching the rest of the house rather than get it out of the kitchen.

An extractor fan on full helps. Cooking it early in the day helps, because you have the rest of the day to air the place out. Doing it on a still, closed up winter evening is how you end up apologising to people.

If you want the flavour and not the Sunday

The honest position is that a lot of people want shutki occasionally and do not want to spend an afternoon on it.

There are four frozen bhorta on the shelf at $12.99 for a 200 gram tub: chapa shutki, chingri shutki, loita shutki and taki shutki. Already mashed, already fried, already done. Thaw, warm it through, eat it with rice. There is also a smaller Loitta Shutki Borta at $5.99 if you want to try one without committing.

It is not the same as your mother's. Very little is. On a Tuesday night it is close enough, and the alternative is usually not making it at all.

Questions people ask

Is shutki halal? Fish is halal by nature in Islamic dietary law, and drying does not change that.

How long does it keep? Unopened and dry, a long time. Once opened, keep it sealed and in the freezer rather than the cupboard, which stops it picking up moisture and keeps the smell contained.

Which should I buy first? Keski. It is the mildest and the cheapest, so a failed first attempt costs five dollars.

Why is it so expensive by weight? It is not, once you account for the water. Drying removes most of the weight of the original fish, so a small bag of shutki represents a lot more fish than it looks like, and you use far less of it per dish.

Can I cook it in a shared kitchen? You can, and you should probably tell people first.