Piri Piri Sardines / Sardientjes piri piri

HYGIENE, man! This recipe required me to marinate the sardines in piri piri sauce for a few hours, then drain them, grill the sardines, and then serve the sauce - as is, uncooked - with the sardines. So the marinade for the fish is served raw as a sauce - why bother grilling the sardines at all? I decided to drain the sardines and cook the piri piri sauce in a small sauce pan. Additionally, I didn't dip the baguette slices in the piri piri before grilling them; instead, I dipped them in garlic-marinated oil. This felt much safer/less gross. Next time I would probably use only half the amount of sauce for marinating, and serve the other half as sauce, or maybe even completely skip marinating the sardines.

The other thing that went wrong is that the cooking times and temperatures were pretty off. If you grill both the fish and the bread on high, they will burn pretty quickly, but in the case of the sardines, they won't be cooked through, and in case of the bread, it'll have a lot of black spots without being properly crunchy. Use low heat and more time for both of them. For the sardines we needed 7-8 minutes per side instead of the indicated 2 minutes. Luckily DH was so sweet to take over while I watched the football game (the joys of a binational home).

Tastewise they were quite nice. DH really loved the piri piri sauce, I thought it was just a bit overpowering. I used 1/4 tsp cayenne as the chilli from our local supermarkt seems to have lost its strength a few months ago, and it was just right. We had 8 sardines / 550g, already cleaned, for a main course for two, along with a simple tomato salad.