Charcoal Grilled Whole Fish Recipes

1. Grilled Stuffed Whole Snapper Recipe
2. Grilled Whole Snapper With Herbs And Citrus
3. Thai Whole Fish Recipe With Coriander Chili Sauce
1. Grilled Whole Fish
   1. How To Barbecue A Whole Snapper
   2. Whole Snapper Roasted With Herbs And Potato Recipe

Grilled Whole Fish Stuffed with Herbs and Chilies Stuff mild, meaty tilapia with fresh herbs and chilies before putting it on the grill, and you'll have fish full of delicate flavor and a crisp, crackling skin.

Georgia is the former managing editor for Saveur magazine and the author of two cookbooks. She has been published in Food & Wine, The Wall Street Journal, and Martha Stewart Living.

In the U.S., summer grilling season feels synonymous with burgers and hot dogs. But after I’ve had my fill of Americana, I turn to another source for grilling inspiration: The cooks living on China’s border of Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam who grill all year long as their primary way of cooking.

How To Grill Fish At Home

This super simple, flavorful grilled fish comes from China’s Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Region, a small sub-tropical area just a few miles from both Laos and Myanmar.

The idea is simple—a whole fish is stuffed with fresh herbs and chilies, is grilled over hot coals and brushed with salty oil as it cooks—but as the herbs wilt from the heat, their fragrance perfumes the fish and gives it a lovely, delicate flavor.

The result is far more than the sum of its parts, a wonderful dish for a weekend barbecue or to serve to friends when you want something that is easy to prepare but looks impressive.

Grilled Stuffed Whole Snapper Recipe

Buying a whole fish might be daunting for anyone who hasn’t cooked a head-on specimen before, but your local fish shop or well-staffed market can make the process simple for you.

If you can, buy your fish from a shop with a knowledgeable fish monger behind the counter and ask when it was caught. A store where lots of people are buying fish is also a good sign, as it means there’s a lot of turnover. (Personally, I prefer to buy my fish at a nearby Chinese supermarket, which has a very busy seafood counter.)

Next, ask the fishmonger to gut and scale the fish for you and to cut the fish open so that you can stuff not only the belly but also the tail; some shops may even have a chart you can point to, to specify what you’re looking for.

Grilled Whole Snapper With Herbs And Citrus

Alternatively, you can ask them to butterfly the fish so that it is cut open from the head through the end of the tail, but the two sides are still connected. (If you have a really good fishmonger, they can cut it open along the back, instead of through the belly, preserving the tender belly meat.)

If you buy a fish that has been scaled and gutted but hasn’t been fully cut open (in other words, if only the center of the stomach has been cut into), just use a sharp knife to carefully lengthen the opening in the belly so that the front of the body and the meaty part of the tail are also split lengthwise, then make the split deeper, so that it reaches the fish’s backbone.

The fish is ideal, because its flesh is meaty but very mild in flavor, and it soaks up the perfume from the herbs as they cook.

Thai Whole Fish Recipe With Coriander Chili Sauce

This method, however, also works well with red snapper. If choosing a snapper, you might want to use kitchen scissors to trim off the edges of the fish’s fins, which can be quite sharp.

When it comes to cooking a whole fish, the key to easy grilling is to invest in a grill basket that folds over both sides of the fish to hold it together and let you easily flip it from side to side.

Grill baskets come in a number of styles—there are open-top baskets good for keeping vegetables from falling into the coals and very flat baskets that work well for thin fish.

Barbecue Fish Recipes

The fish will stick to the basket as it grills. You can oil the inside of the basket to help keep it from sticking, but you’ll still need to extract the fish very carefully, using a chopstick or another narrow tool to push the mesh away from the fish’s skin as you open the basket.

If you want some more tips and tricks for cooking fish on the grill we have an amazing guide that tells you everything you need to know about grilling whole fish, fish fillets, and fish steaks.

The result won’t be quite the same because you’ll miss some of the smoky flavor the grill produces, and only one side of the fish will become crisp, but the flavors of the herbs and chilies will still come through nicely.

Grilled Whole Fish

There are a couple of ways to see if your fish is fully cooked through before you take it out of the grill basket.

While the recipe below includes some of my favorite ways to flavor this dish, you can stuff fish with a wide variety of herbs and chilies.

In some parts of Southwestern China (where this recipe comes from), cooks alternate between making this dish with just cilantro and some spicy Thai chilies and stuffing it with more complex pastes full of chilies and herbs. Some fun combinations include:

Thai Baked Whole Fish In Garlic Chile Sauce Recipe

If you want a little more flavor and spice, you can also mix some ground chili or chili flakes into the vegetable oil, along with the salt, and use that to add flavor to the fish’s skin as it cooks.

This recipe is portioned to be served Chinese-style, with two to three sides to round out the meal. In Southwestern China, this dish is often served with dishes that are reminiscent of Lao and Thai foods, including pineapple sticky rice (this pineapple fried rice makes an easy substitute) and green papaya salad. I also often serve it with a quick Chinese cucumber salad. Cooked Chinese greens, like stir-fried long beans or Sichuan eggplant, would also work well.

For a thick fish like tilapia or snapper, look for a grill cage with inch-thick sides, like the large Ordora Portable Fish Grill Basket, which has 1.2 inch sides, or Asher Grill’s slightly narrower grill basket. (These cost around $20, but you can also find cheaper versions in some Asian markets that specialize in cooking tools.)

How To Barbecue A Whole Snapper

Your tilapia should be cleaned, scaled, and cut open so that you have a large cavity in the body of the fish to stuff it with herbs and chilies.

*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2, 000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.

Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate. In cases where multiple ingredient alternatives are given, the first listed is calculated for nutrition. Garnishes and optional ingredients are not included.

Whole Snapper Roasted With Herbs And Potato Recipe

When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. You can find out more about our use, change your default settings, and withdraw your consent at any time with effect for the future by visiting Cookies Settings, which can also be found in the footer of the site.There’s a general rule in barbecue and grilling that the thicker the protein, the easier it is to cook. Or perhaps that should be phrased as, the lower your chances of messing it up. It’s MUCH easier to cook a 2″ thick steak perfectly than it is to nail a thin cut one. The same logic applies to seafood. Big shrimp are going to grill better than teeny ones. And of course, whole fish is going to grill better than thin filets.

As a bonus, keeping the fish gutted but whole allows you to both crisp the skin up, and introduce aromatic herbs and citrus by stuffing the cavity. And you still end up with that phenomenal grilled flavor. My favorite way to devour the finished product is to serve it up on a platter and stand around with some cold beers. Don’t be shy, just dig in! And don’t forget to eat that amazing cheek meat, too.

Honestly, the secret hero of grilling whole fish (aside from starting with a lovely raw product) is spray oil. Lots of spray oil. There are other methods that involve special tools or very specific steps that may or may not work, but this is the most foolproof one I have come across. The biggest peril of grilling fish is having it cling to the grill, and tearing the delicate flesh. Lubricating with plenty of oil lessens that risk. Significantly. I coat the fish in olive oil to start, then spray both the side of fish AND the section of grill grate I am about to flip on to. And I don’t just do it once – but every time I plan on moving or flipping the fish.

How To Grill Whole Fish (without It Sticking!)

Obviously, you will need to exercise a little caution when spraying pressurized oil near charcoal! If you’ve not done it before, it’s