We purchased beautiful Swordfish Steaks at McCall’s Meat andFish. We had read an article in The New York Times about cooking fish. We
wanted to try their recipe. It is worth reading the article. The recipe is buried
within it.
We served the Swordfish and Butter Sauce over our very favorite
and rich mashed potato recipe. We used the recipe for Garlic Mashed Potato recipe in TheBalthazar Cookbook by McNally, Nasr,
Hanson. This is a fantastic recipe - it is super-rich! You can find the recipe
on our blog of: November 12, 2012. Click the date to get the
recipe.
With
the Swordfish Cathy sautéed fresh Snap Peas. It was a delicious dinner.
Read
the article and recipe below about cooking fish.
Conquering the Fear of Cooking
Fish
The New York Times
Fear of fish can afflict even the most confident cook.
Fewer and fewer fish have crossed my stove in recent
years. This is partly out of guilt, because wild species are so often out of
season or endangered, and farmed fish are so often unappealing. It is partly
because in my apartment, to cook fish for dinner is to live with its smell for
a day and a half. And it is partly because I ate so much fancy fish in
restaurants to make up for my failings as a home cook that I had forgotten how
delicious a simple buttery pan-fried fillet can be.
The modern fashion in restaurants is to serve fillets
swimming in a broth, juice or nage (as if returning to water is somehow natural
for cooked fish). Other chefs like oil-poaching, which involves a slow simmer
in gallons of top-quality oil; expensive and impractical for Tuesday-night
dinner at home.
And others recommend that home cooks start with en
papillote: folding up individual fillets in parchment paper with butter and
herbs, which steams the fish and produces a kind of thin broth. This is not a
thrilling outcome.
For weeknight home cooking, I wanted a way to cook a
fish fillet the way I cook all my favorite proteins (steaks, shrimp, lamb
chops): quickly, simply and over high-enough heat to bring on the browning that
makes food crisp, appetizing and fragrant. (Food science nerds call them Maillard
reactions.) But a simple sear in oil isn’t the answer for fish: overcooked and
flavorless fillets are the result.
I brought the quandary to Mark Usewicz, a former chef
and current co-owner of Mermaid’s Garden
in Brooklyn, where he teaches classes for home cooks, like “How to
Cook Fish in a New York City Apartment.”
His solution (of course) involved butter.
The best way to cook a fish fillet, he said, is on top
of the stove in a heavy skillet, with constant attention — not a tall order, as
the whole process takes less than five minutes from start to finish. The short
cooking time seriously reduces the chance of lingering smells.
The initial sear should be in oil that will not burn
over high heat: grapeseed, canola or even extra-virgin olive oil. (Although
experts advise us not to waste extra-virgin oil on sautéing, using a few
teaspoons here and there is well worth it for convenience and taste.)
Continue reading the main story
To finish the cooking, add a nut of butter to the pan,
flip the fillet and baste furiously. The melting butter will keep the flesh
tender, help form a tasty crust and finally brown lightly to become a sauce for
the finished dish. A few fresh herb sprigs tossed in at the same time perfume
the whole thing nicely.
“It’s a variation on the most basic restaurant recipe,
the first one you learn at the fish station,” he said. In most restaurant
kitchens, the cooking starts on top of the stove but is finished in a hot oven,
to make room for the next table’s order. For home cooks, heating the oven to
400 degrees for five minutes of cooking time is an unnecessary step.
Renee Erickson,
a Seattle chef who specializes in seafood at her restaurants, the Whale Wins,
the Walrus and the Carpenter, Boat Street Café and Barnacle, also relies on
butter-basting as the best basic way to cook fillets, from fatty salmon to
slender flounder. “There are more delicate ways to cook fish, I suppose,” she
said, but not tastier ones.
“If you order a pan-fried fillet from one of our
kitchens, it comes out seriously browned,” she said. If the pan and contents
get too hot during the cooking and threaten to scorch, she advised, add a bit
more cold butter or squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.
Melina Hammer for The New York Times
The method works for small whole fish, too, she said, as
well as skinless and skin-on fillets. You can score the skin with the tip of a
sharp knife to prevent the fillet from curling as it cooks or (even easier)
just press down on it lightly for the first minute or so of cooking.
What kind of fish to buy for this dish? Assuming your
fish is in good shape, and the right thickness — not less than a half-inch
thick or more than an inch — almost any fillet can be cooked this way, from
brook trout to Arctic char. Black cod, rockfish and halibut are excellent
choices from the Pacific; from the Atlantic, sea bass, grouper and snappers;
red drum from the Gulf of Mexico.
Mr. Usewicz said that selecting the right fish for a
particular recipe is prominent among the anxieties people bring into his shop.
“It is amazing how afraid people are of fish,” he said.
“Afraid of cooking it, afraid of buying it, afraid of keeping it.” Most of his
customers, for example, firmly believe that fish can’t even be kept overnight
in the refrigerator without spoiling. “Fish is like any other kind of protein,”
he said. “It’s perishable.” But that doesn’t mean it’s on the verge of
spoilage.
Continue reading the main story
“A really nice piece of fish lasts a few days in the
fridge, and it doesn’t smell up your house any more than steak does,” he said,
as long as it’s been treated properly from the moment of catch. That usually
means eviscerated on deck, frozen or flown to market within hours and kept cold
at all points on the way to the case.
“People get all caught up in choosing exactly the right
kind of fish,” he said. “But really, the most important thing that will affect
your dish is how it’s handled before you ever see it.”
