Valentine Warner’s Sea Bream Ceviche Recipe

Welcome to City Harvest Cooking

City Harvest Cooking is a series where guest chefs and cooks join City Harvest in its London food rescue warehouse to create amazing dishes from surplus food. It’s all about being resourceful and getting creative with whatever might be in City Harvest’s food redistribution depot on the day of cooking. The beauty of food redistribution is its unpredictability, although having a network of fresh produce suppliers means that we often see seasonal goods come through our depot doors.

This year, we kick off City Harvest Cooking with TV chef and food writer, Valentine Warner. Warner is a member of City Harvest’s Food Council, a collective that works with City Harvest to achieve its overall aims – Rescuing Food, People and the Planet – through thought-leadership, engaging with decision-makers and more.

“City Harvest is my favourite charity, everyone here is amazing. [They’re] redistributing food all over London, so that it can be cooked and given to people who are really struggling to feed themselves, and it’s shocking that the need for what they’re doing is increasing.”

Valentine Warner

Ingredients  (serves 2)

Prep time: 10 mins (no cook recipe)

•  2 salad tomatoes, finely diced
• 1 jalapeño chilli, finely chopped
• 1 small red onion, finely diced
• Juice of 3 limes
• ½ tsp ground cumin (jeera)
• Generous handful of coriander, roughly chopped
• 2 x sea bream fillets
• Sea salt to taste

Garnish: 

• Sliced, fresh jalapeño 
• Fresh coriander, roughly chopped

Method

1. Finely dice your salad tomatoes, red onion, and jalapeño with a sharp or serrated knife. Set aside.
2. Roughly chop your coriander, using both the stems and leaves.
3. In a shallow serving bowl, add your freshly chopped, raw ingredients.
4. Give your seabream fillets a quick rinse in cold water and pat dry with a paper towel.
5. On a separate chopping board, using a very sharp knife, carefully skin the bream fillets, making sure to separate all the flesh from the skin. Discard the skin (or save it fry as a delicious snack).
6. Once you have removed the skin from the fish, delicately slice the fish into odd-sized bites.
7. Add the fish to your chopped ingredients in the serving bowl.
8. Juice all 3 limes with a fork or a lemon squeezer, making sure to get every drop of juice. Watch the video for Valentine’s hack for juicing stubborn or less-juicy limes.
9. Dress the fish and vegetables with the lime juice, ground cumin and salt and give it a gentle stir.
10. Leave the ceviche mix for at least 10 minutes to allow the lime juice (citric acid) to ‘cook’ the fish.
11. Garnish with a flurry of fresh coriander and any additional jalapeno pepper. Serve as it is or with corn tortillas for a crunchy texture.