Sweet discovery added flavour to her fish

Imagine sipping tea or coffee accompanied with baked, dough coated fish buns. It was a first for me when fish farmer Zinath Deen welcomed me to a cup of tea at her farm house in Boyani, Vihiga County.

As I relish the surprise treat, Zinath delves into what she dubs a sweet discovery that has transformed her farming.

She explains with glee splashed all over her grandmotherly face: “After several years harvesting and selling live fish with reasonably good earnings, I realised there was a hidden treasure in the finned creatures.”

She continues: “I said to myself, I have many fish in my ponds. With a little effort and creativity, I can use them to feed more people and make more money in the process, hence products such as the fish bun you are now enjoying. I can make several of them from one fish using wheat flour, milk, salt, sugar, yeast, butter and baking powder as enrichment.”

“For fish samosas that are popular with children and people not known to be enthusiastic about fish eating, I render them more nutritious and delicious by adding anything from spinach to sukuma wiki, capsicum and even pepper and dhania. You will have a taste of the novel tasty samosas before you leave here,” she says.

Mouth-watering

I called in at Mama Zinath’s farm at an opportune moment to sample her unique experiment that has caught the attention of agricultural shows.

Her raw materials comprise the fish, wheat flour, cooking fat, salt, sugar, Irish potatoes, eggs, baking powder and an assortment of vegetables sourced from the neighbourhood.

On a table at the corner of her house are trays of onions, ginger, limes, red and white pepper, carrots, capsicum, bread crumbs, garlic, dhania and dough.

Finished products at the bench outside were mouth-watering and villagers trooping in to buy had to leave disappointed but armed with hope to return later because that particular consignment was for the agricultural show. There were samosas, kebaabs, fish fingers, fish balls, fish buns, fish pizza and more. What she called chutney was a concoction of carrots, onion, capsicum, sweet pepper, lemon, salt and dhania.

“Chutney can be used with all these products. It adds taste. All you do is dip, say, fish fingers or samosas or any other product into chutney and eat,” she explains.

“You may wonder what happens to the fish heads,” she says as though to preempt a question I am about to ask and says “I sell them to owners of small hotels in Kisumu, Kakamega and other places. I am never short of market.”

Back to the value added products. The widowed mother of two says, “I have come across people who complain about fish ‘staring’ at them as they eat it or are averse to the smell but are comfortable with these products”.

She adds: “Fish farming came my way naturally after nearly a decade in the civil service as a typist and a brief stint running a hotel business in Nairobi where fish featured prominently.”

She says: “It hit me around 2010 that I would combine selling fish with growing it and the urge drove me back home to Boyani where a three acre piece of land was lying idle. After building my first pond, I went to the Lake Basin Development Authority for my first stock of 200 fingerlings and embarked on mixed farming.”

Seeing the incredulity on my face, she explains:”Mixed farming is where female and male fish are stocked together in a pond. I have since moved from that to specialised mono sex male farming that guarantees better yields, thanks to intensive training facilitated by the Trilateral Tilapia Cooperation (TTC).”

The TTC project is a coordinated effort of Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, selected Western Kenya Counties, the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development through its implementing agency Deutsche Gesellsch für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation that support farmers through capacity building and training.

Blurbs Zinath: “I am immensely grateful to GIZ that together with the Food Security and Drought Resilience Programme  helped me expand on what I had. I now rear fingerlings as well help upcoming farmers stock easily and I have availed my farm and expertise for training at no cost. My gate is always open for people wishing to improve their fish farming skills.” Mama Zinath is putting up a fish hatchery for fingerlings in memory of her husband, the late Shahab Deen who passed on last year. Both her children are grown ups living independently.