Masmirus

Masmirus needs to be cooked gently and slowly for all the flavours to really come together. Our version is rather spicy, but do feel free to kick it up a notch as well as adjust the other tastes to your liking during the latter stages of the cooking process.

Makes: just over a cup

Ingredients:

• 1 onion
• 2 ½ tbsp. oil
• 1 tsp. grated garlic
• 1 tsp. grated ginger
• ½ tsp. minced curry leaves
• ¼ cup coarsely ground dried tuna (muguri mas)
• ½ cup coarsely ground dried red chilli
• 1 tbsp. dark soy sauce
• ½ tbsp. oyster sauce
• 1 ½ tsp. sugar
• ¼ lime
• ½ tsp. salt (or to taste)

Instructions:

1. Slice the onion thinly.
2. Heat the oil in a pot. Once the oil has sufficiently heated up, add the onions. We are going to keep the heat on low throughout the process so do keep that in mind.
3. Cook the onions until you can see just a hint of brown. Then add the garlic, ginger and curry leaves. Stir and cook the mixture for around 2 minutes.  
4. Add the dried tuna, mix well and cook the mixture until the onions and the dried tuna become crispy. It’s going to take something like 10 minutes.
5. Remove the pot from the stove. Add the dried chilli, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and lime and mix everything together. Do a taste test and add some salt if you need to; we added ½ a teaspoon.   
6. Return the pot to the stove and cook for another minute while stirring and that’s it. You can then let the mixture cool down a bit and transfer it to a container.