This tropical Indo-Pacific fish is found from the east coast of Africa to the Pacific Islands and as far south as the north coast of Australia. The fish gets its name from its strange extensible mouth which looks like a pony's nose when extended.
Pony Fish can grow to 11 inches but the photo specimen was 9-1/2 inches
and weighed 8.1 oz, caught wild off Thailand. Living near river mouths and in
mangrove areas they are both farmed and caught wild and sold both fresh and
dried. They have no scales I could find so are probably not kosher, but
they're not considered threatened.
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Pony Fish flesh is medium in flavor and stays fairly firm when cooked. It is very bony, but the bones are mostly fused together at the fin margins so it's not real hard to eat. A 9 oz Pony Fish will yield about 4 oz of flesh. The skin shrinks severely when cooked, so If you steam this fish the body skin comes off in shreds and since the whole head end is just skin over bone it comes apart and looks really ugly. My favorite way to eat these is to cut off the head behind the collar (which makes cleaning very easy), lightly dust them with rice flour and pan fry them - then pour a little lemon butter sauce over and eat them off the bones. The fillets come clean off the skeleton and the only bones you have to deal with a very few long thin ribs up at the front. Not too much trouble at all, and when they're on sale for U.S. $0.99/# at a Philippine fish market, why not? |
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