Okay, one last recipe (for now) for pejerrey, then it’s time to give some other fish their due time in the spotlight, no? I can’t resist anything that purports to be a pizza, nature’s most perfect food. So when I saw that there’s a classic local dish called a pizza de pejerrey, I just couldn’t. Resist. I’ve never seen it on a menu, I’d be curious if anyone ever serves it. Then again, other than the pejerrey a la romana that I started this series of recipe posts with, I’ve never seen any of these on a menu – they seem to be classics from a bygone era. And online, this one is near non-existent, a Google search this morning yields up only 20 hits, but really just from 3 different sites, and they disagree on the recipe. I went with the one I found in an old cookbook, though I have to admit, on reviewing the online recipes, I might have been better served going with one of them….

Very simple dish with just a few ingredients – the pejerrey (I made a small pizza rather than a large one, I was solo in the house for the day, so you could just double or triple some of the quantities here), 1 tomato, 1 clove garlic, dried oregano, olive oil, 100 gm 0000 flour (cake/pastry flour), 250 ml milk, 1 egg, butter.

Butter your pizza mold well – I don’t have a small pizza mold, so this casserole dish was the perfect size for a single fish – it worked fine, though a pizza mold would have been easier to work with. Clean and fillet the fish and lay it skin side down in the mold (if you were doing a full pizza, I’d lay them around like spokes of a wheel), sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper.

Whisk together the flour, milk and egg until smooth and pour over the fish to a depth that’s just about double the thickness of the fish – the amount above turns out to be enough for a larger “pizza”, so if you’re making up to a medium sized pie, you probably don’t need to change the quantities on that. Slice the tomato and remove the seeds, place the slices around. Sprinkle with the oregano and chopped garlic, a little more salt and pepper, and then drizzle just a bit of good olive oil around.

Bake in a hot oven (200C/400F) for about 12-15 minutes until the pizza puffs up and gets a little golden crust on top.

You can see that this is more like a fritatta than it is a pizza, or “baked eggs”. That was sort of obvious from the ingredients when I got down to it, and the other couple of online recipes seem similar in that regard (one uses just eggs and flour, no milk, which likely comes out almost like a baked pasta – hard to tell without trying it).

And you can see that it has a nice layer of fish below, the tomatoes, garlic and herbs above, but the texture is almost like a thick custard – a savory clafouti came to mind. It’s an interesting dish that I could see as a brunch offering. It’s clearly not a pizza by any stretch of the imagination. I thought the delicate flavor of the pejerrey was pretty much lost here, while personally I think I’d like it better with a stronger flavored fish, that may be the thought behind it since fish isn’t one of the most popular items in the Argentine cooking canon. But it did get me thinking about a fish topped pizza, something I’ve done before, though not with pejerrey.

Next up, what to do when life gives you a Palometa.