Arctic char with beurre blanc and sautéed vegetables

You may have never heard of arctic char, but if your grocery store carries it, I urge you to give it a try. In terms of taste, it is somewhere between a salmon and a lake trout, with a nice fatty flesh and skin that is also very tasty. I buy it whole whenever the grocery store carries it since this is the freshest way to get fish, but you can obviously just buy fillets if you don’t want to fillet it yourself. Of course, you can make this dish with salmon or trout if you don’t have arctic char.

If you want to learn how to fillet round fish, you can check out the video on this previous post. Leave the skin on; it would be a waste to throw it out since it is so delicious, especially when cooked to a crisp as per this recipe.

Here is the whole fish.

One side removed.

Two beautiful fillets!

Cut the large fillets into smaller portions, however large you wish to have them. Here are the rest of the ingredients:

Red bell peppers, julienned

Mushrooms, sliced thick. You can use whatever mushrooms you like, I’ve just used regular white mushrooms, but shitake would go very well.

For the beurre blanc:

One shallot, diced as finely as possible

Dry white wine, about half a cup (that’s what I used for 2 medium-sized portions of fish)

Butter

Pour the wine into a sauce pan and add the shallots. Simmer for about 20 minutes such that the wine reduces to about a third of its original volume (as with all my measurements and suggested cooking times, these numbers are crude and approximate). Some people leave the shallots in the sauce but I prefer to strain them out. After straining the shallots out, return the wine to the sauce pan and on low heat, add the butter about a tablespoon at a time and keep mixing it thoroughly until the sauce has a thick, smooth texture and coats the back of a spoon. This sauce (and any butter-thickened sauce) is thickened by emulsifying the liquid and the butter, so if you don’t keep stirring, you will just wind up with melted butter floating on top of the wine – not particularly appealing. Season the sauce to taste at the very end. You should always season your sauces after you’re done with the reductions; if you season to taste and then reduce, it will be so salty that it will be inedible.

Sautee the mushrooms in some butter and add the bell peppers until soft. Season to taste.

Preheat a non-stick pan (fish is one of the few things that requires non-stick – eggs are another), and add olive oil once it’s hot. Season the fish on both sides and put it into the frying pan skin-side down. The majority of the cooking time will take place with the fish on its skin. There are two good reasons for doing this: First, you will get a very nice crisp skin; and second, the skin will protect the flesh of the fish from being exposed to very high heat and drying out. Once you see that the fish has cooked about two-thirds of the way up the side of the fillet, turn the heat down a bit and flip it over. Cook it until you can see that the entire fillet has cooked through on the side. This will take a different amount of time depending on the thickness of the fish, but it probably won’t be longer than 1-1.5 minutes.

Serve the fish on top of the vegetables and pour the sauce on top of the skin.

Overlooked meats - Part 1: Lamb shank fricassee

I've decided to write a number of recipes devoted to introducing some sadly overlooked cuts of meat. If all you're familiar with are rib-eye steaks, beef tenderloin (if you're fortunate enough to be able to afford it), and pork chops, this series of recipes will hopefully broaden your view of just how many delicious cuts of meat are available. Actually, in America (or at least, in New England, where I live), the variety of meat that is available is very limited in comparison to Europe, or even Canada (where I grew up).

The only problem with some of these cuts is that they are very tough and require long cooking times, which is perhaps why they are not so widely-used. These might be dishes that you could cook on the weekends when you have a few hours to let them simmer away.

The first dish is a fricassee made from lamb shanks. The shank is the lower part of the leg (shin) and since it is constantly working, it tends to be rather tough. Because of this, it is a good candidate for braising, which tenderizes the meat through long cooking in a liquid that later becomes the sauce. This recipe should be enough for 4 people.

2 lamb shanks
3 large portobello mushrooms, cubed
2 stalks celery, cut into very small cubes
3-4 medium-sized shallots, chopped
white wine
1 full teaspoon flour
2 cloves garlic
2 bay leaves
few stalks of rosemary
a bit of cream

Trim the visible layer of silverskin from the lamb. Silverskin is a tough, somewhat shiny membrane that can easily be removed by slipping a knife under it and slowly working the knife edge along the tough membrane. Once they've been trimmed, brown the shanks all over in some olive oil until they're golden.

Remove the shanks from the pot and add the shallots and saute them until they're soft. Next add the celery and mushrooms and sautee until the mushrooms have been softened and reduced in volume (they shrink because the water within them evaporates as you cook them, which intensifies the flavor). Next, add the flour to the pot and mix it in until it incorporates with the oil.

Return the shanks to the pot, then pour in the wine until the shanks are about halfway covered in liquid. Wrap the garlic, bay leaf, and rosemary in  cheesecloth to make a bouquet garni.

Put the bouquet garni in the liquid; it adds flavor without being overpowering, and can easily be discarded once the dish is finished. Add salt and pepper, but don't try to get the seasoning right for now; if you do, it will most likely be over-seasoned once it's cooked, since some liquid will evaporate and the flavors will transfer during cooking. Always under-season braised dishes at the beginning, you will correct it once it's completely cooked.

Bring the pot to a simmer, then place a lid on it and lower the heat to the lowest possible setting that will allow a very gentle simmer (bubbles just gently break the surface of the liquid). Even better, you can place the pot in a very low oven (200-225F) as long as it doesn't have plastic handles. Keep an eye on it periodically to make sure it doesn't boil too vigorously. Also, occasionally turn and move the shanks while they cook.

After about an hour and a half, take the shanks out and trim all the meat from the bones into small cubes. Return the meat to the pot along with the bones and simmer for another 1-1.5 hours. If you want the sauce to be rather thick, you can take the lid off the pot to allow it to reduce near the end (last 15-20 minutes, depending on how thick you want it and how high your heat is). Once it's done, take out the bouquet garni and the bones, and add a bit of cream, to your taste. Now you can finally correct the seasoning.

This dish works well on its own, or with a thicker sauce, goes very well with fresh tagliatelle (or good dry pasta).

Sea-bass with yellow pepper sauce

This is a simple dish with only five ingredients, and can be prepared relatively quickly. The fish is the Mediterranean sea-bass (or Brazzini as it's sometimes called in the US), not the Chilean sea-bass which is much larger and - from I've heard - endangered. I buy the fish whole and fillet them myself, but I'm sure that the place where you buy your fish can do this for you (perhaps for an additional charge). If you'd like to learn how to fillet a fish yourself, it's really not that difficult and I encourage you to learn; it's obviously much fresher and more flavorful this way. The first few times you do it you'll probably leave too much on the bones, but who cares, you'll get better with time. Here is short video that explains it perfectly (here he's filleting a Salmon, but all round fish are pretty much the same):

2 whole sea-bass (4 fillets)
1 yellow bell-pepper, cut into very small, thin pieces
2 thin slices of ginger
1 clove of garlic, cut in half
a bit of double cream

Saute the bell-peppers in some butter until they are nice and soft (about 5-10 minutes, depending on how small you cut the pieces). Put them in a blender or food processor with a bit of cream and puree it until you have a fairly smooth texture. The amount of cream is up to you, however, if it's too little you won't be able to puree the peppers, and if it's too much, you'll drown out the pepper flavor and your sauce will also be too runny. I suggest putting it in a bit at a time, until there's enough liquid to allow you to get a smooth puree. Then pass the pepper puree through a very fine sieve (or a regular strainer lined with a layer of cheese-cloth) to catch the skin of the pepper and other solid pieces. If you don't sieve the sauce, it will not be smooth and the texture won't be very nice (mainly because of the skin).

Put the pepper puree in a sauce pan along with the ginger and the garlic. Bring it to a gentle boil then turn it to low and put the lid on. After 5 minutes, check to see if the consistency is to your liking; if it's too runny, continue to boil it but with the lid off so that it thickens. It should take about another 5 minutes. After a total of 10 minutes, take the ginger and garlic out of the sauce; their purpose was simply to infuse the sauce with a subtle flavor. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Salt and pepper the fish on its skin side (you eat the skin, it has an excellent flavor). Preheat a non-stick pan and add a bit of olive oil. When the oil is very hot (almost smoking) put the fish skin side down into the pan. Push down to flatten it, since the extreme heat will will cause the skin to curl up and lose contact with the pan. While it's on its skin, salt and pepper the other side. You want to brown the skin but you have a very limited amount of time to do it before having to flip the fish over, which is why the pan has to be very hot before you put the fish in. You'll be able to tell how far the fish has cooked through by looking at it, since it will turn solid white once it's cooked. When you can see that it's cooked about 2/3 of the way through (probably around 2 minutes or so) flip it over. It should take about another 30-45 seconds to finish cooking.

Put the sauce on the plate and fish on top, skin side up. You can eat this on its own or with mash potatoes or steamed vegetables, or whatever other garnish that you happen to like.

If cooking fish has scared you in the past, I hope this short write-up can convey just how easy it is. It literally takes about 3 minutes in a pan to cook such thin fillets as sea-bass, sea-bream, red snapper, or similarly sized (around 500-600g) white-fleshed fish (obviously, cooking times can vary drastically from fish to fish, especially depending on their thickness). I think the vast majority of restaurants overcook fish because they think that 2 or 3 minutes is simply too short a time-span. I'll steal a quote from Marco Pierre White on this one: 'Just remember, when you're cooking fish, 15 seconds is a lifetime'.