Then you’ll need to add it to a mixing bowl with two generous pinches of salt, some chopped cilantro and just a bit of hot chopped red chili pepper. Mix these together with your pieces of fish and leave in the fridge for 15 minutes or so.
Next, chop the red onion into fine pieces, and leave it in a bowl with a cup of ice-cold water for about 10 minutes. This will reduce some of the bitterness of the flavor.
The most important step is next: adding all of that lime juice (squeezed from fresh limes ,of course) to your bowl of fish.
Finally, you’ll add the red onion, add your slices of sweet potato and top with some more chopped cilantro. The fishy, limey sauce formed by the acidifying of the raw fish in the juice is drizzled on top. Grab a spoon and dig in!
This is a pretty basic recipe. It’s a strange thing, but often the simplest recipes require the most patience to get perfectly right. There’s an Italian pasta dish I adore called cacio e pepe that really depends on just three ingredients for the sauce: romano cheese (cacio) with black pepper (pepe) and pasta water that you carefully add to the cheese once you’ve cooked your noodles. It’s three ingredients and yet it’s very hard to get right. The water temperature, the amount of salt in the water, and the ratio of water to starch, or carbohydrates released during the cooking of the noodles all have to be just right. Ceviche is similar. The number of limes, the freshness of the limes, the amount of salt – everybody has their own opinion. Naturally, if you visit Perú, you’ll find lots of regional specialties.
