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.
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