You're Not Cooking Enough Of This Affordable, Richly Flavored Fish

If fish is already in your regular grocery rotation, but you've glazed enough salmon for the foreseeable future, and the difference between your branzino and sea bass seems murkier with each preparation, we have just the seafood for you to try next: mackerel. Mackerel is among the most uniquely flavored swimmers in the sea, with a famously oily texture and a sweet-salty finish that you're unlikely to mistake for anything else once you've had a taste. And, although affordability is relative to region, season, and individual household, mackerel is also typically among some of the most inexpensive fish varieties that you can't afford to overlook at the market.

Mackerel isn't any harder to make than the seafood you might already be more used to, either. If you've grilled a whole fish, pan-fried filets, or air-fried any configuration, you can apply the same principles to mackerel. You may just want to adjust your seasonings to accommodate its salinity, and remember that it will also have different ideal applications than something more neutral like cod.

In the event that this is your first dalliance with mackerel, it's a boon to see what its intended execution is like before you dive in yourself. Ergo, if you can order it at a restaurant in advance of your first home-cooking effort, you'll be starting from ahead. It needn't be from anywhere fancy, either, and in fact, the simpler the recipe, the better baseline you'll have. Alternatively, preserved fish has also come a long way, and a variety like Testa wild sicilian sgombro could be a fine introduction to mackerel preparation, too.

Once you've performed your seafood recon, and you've got a beautiful piece of mackerel at home awaiting the flame, it's also a good idea to keep its accoutrement simple. Gordon Ramsay's paste for marinating mackerel calls for just four ingredients, for example — olive oil, paprika, garlic, and some salt. You might even want to keep it simpler still, with little more than salt, pepper, and lemon to finish, experimenting with more as you build an expertise to rival even your everyday tuna sandwiches.