CSA week 19 - Baked fish in hoja santa tomatillo sauce

This is a recipe from Victoria Challancin, the owner of the Flavors of the Sun International Cooking School. It's pretty simple and I made it even simpler because, after making the sauce, I didn't have leaves left to wrap the fish too. Also, I didn't have enough fish so I used some shrimp.

Ingredients:
1 share hoja santa leaves, I didn't count. Six? Around that.
6 ounces tomatillos, husked, cleaned and quartered
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 hot chile, seeded or not to your taste I used a seeded jalapeño.
1/6 cup water
salt to taste

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Boil a pot of water. Blanch the hoja santa leaves for 30 seconds. Cool immediately to stop the cooking. Strip out the tough stems and roughly chop.

2. Add everything to a food processor and process until fairly smooth. I found I got little chunks floating in a watery sauce so you might want to keep on blending for a while longer.

3. Place seafood in a baking dish. This makes enough sauce for a couple fillets. Cover with sauce. I didn't, but you might want to cover the dish with foil to try to keep the fish moist. Bake until fish is cooked through, 10-15 minutes.

Serve with tortillas or possibly rice. I made tacos because why not?




Hmm...The sauce is slightly spicy, brightly acid from the not-quite-ripe tomatillos (a squeeze of lime takes the unpleasant edge off the tartness), aromatically herbal, rooty and slightly chemical--unmistakably hoja santa. Nothing transformative here, but the hoja santa flavor, a bit much on its own, works better as a balanced element of the gestalt of the sauce. It goes pretty well with the fish, less well with the shrimp (which were kind of funky today. Maybe from overcooking; maybe I just got a bad batch?) and really well with the tortillas. I'm going to try using hoja santa in a corn salad next time I get some or maybe in tamales...Hold on a second, I just added some chipotle to the sauce and the smokiness is great base for the hoja santa's flavors. That's definitely the way I'm going next time around. Just add a little to this sauce and you'll be happy, I'm promise.

Modular ceviche

I don't have anything particularly original or insightful to say about ceviche, but I've been making it a lot what with the heat recently and the last batch I made turned out so prettily I needed an excuse to post it.



I've done research on the regional variations on ceviche all around Latin America and I just ended up confused. I can't figure out what sort comes from where or why different ingredients show up in different places. I've taken to just throwing together what I've got handy in various combinations and hoping for the best. Usually it works out fine. I use a one from column A, one from column B procedure to guide me to make sure I build up enough different flavors to make something interesting and to build up enough stuff in the bowl so I get a full dinner out of it.

Seafood:
Nearly any sort really, in chunks, slices, chopped or even ground. There are a few guidelines, though. The lower quality the fish I'm using, the smaller I cut it and the longer I marinate it. Raw shrimp is not only unsafe, but it has an unpleasant texture so it's best to cook it a little first. The same goes for sea scallops, but bay scallops are quite nice raw. You can see both of those in the picture. Those are tiny coldwater shrimp from Canada and tiny scallops from Argentina.

Onion:
White, red or green. I like white or red onion chopped fairly fine, but I prefer scallions in larger pieces.

Peppers:
Sweet or hot, sliced thin. Red is nice for the color.

Herbs:
Cilantro is used some places, parsley in others. Some use neither. I prefer cilantro usually. I think I actually used culantro the day of this particular batch.

Corn:
Hominy and/or corn nuts are traditional, but I never have them around so I just use plain old corn kernels and I like it fine. I think a chunk of corn on the cob might be traditional in Peru.

Other possible additions:
Tomatoes-I like fresh, seeded and cut in fairly large pieces. Some use tomato juice as part of the marinade, but I never have that around.
Avocado-I always put it in when I've got it, it adds a nice textural contrast, but not too much to the flavor.
Cucumber-not at all traditional, but it works in a tartar and it works here too. Seeded and finely diced.
Celery-I understand some people add this. I can't see why.

Citrus marinade:
I use lime juice usually, sometimes mixed with lemon. Bitter orange juice is fairly common, but I don't care much for it myself. Grapefruit doesn't work at all. I usually don't marinate very long at all (as is the modern style), particularly if I'm using something that doesn't need the chemical cooking. Longer marinations are useful mainly just for white fish or lower quality tuna.

Starch:
Crackers, corn chips, sliced sweet or white potato, plantains or popcorn. I find popcorn gets mushy quickly if you try to add it to the mix, so that's best served on the side. Homemade corn chips are my favorite.

Hot sauce:
Vinegar based is best. Tabasco is fine, but I like a Peruvian-style hot sauce with a more rounded flavor that I picked up down at one Fairchild festival or another. Check my archives; there's probably a picture of the bottle. Don't use too much, particularly if there are hot peppers in the mix. Ceviche should be seriously sour and hot, but you need to be able to taste everything else too. I've had a white sauce with Peruvian ceviche that would make a nice alternative but I don't know what's in it and I can't find a recipe. Anyone know?

I find ceviche is a really good choice for a weekday dinner when I don't want to stay in a hot kitchen too long. I know my version is a bastardization of a whole host of cuisines, but if I'm too hot and tired to properly cook, I'm too hot and tired to care much about that sort of thing either.

Gravlax variation two

I've been looking for ways to use up the frozen whiting I've got that doesn't involve just frying it up. It's not really good enough to eat without a transmutation into some more interesting form.

The more interesting form, as you may have gathered from the title, is gravlax. If you haven't seen my previous posts on this dish [variation one and variation zero], gravlax is a Swedish cured fish, most commonly made with salmon and flavored with dill.

Making it with whitefish isn't unheard of, though. I'm using two small fillets of the whiting here, for the cure a Tablespoon of sugar and a Tablespoon of kosher salt, and for flavoring a couple big pinches of dried fines herbes and the zest of half a lemon. As is traditional when you've got two fillets (as one traditionally does), I heaped the cure and flavorings on top of one filet and laid the other on top, both skin side out, wrapped it up and let it rest in the refrigerator for three days, flipping every 12 hours. I must say that the flipping makes more sense in this configuration than it did with a single piece of fish.

After that time, it's squished flat and nice and firm. The texture is rather like smoked herring and the flavor not too far from pickled herring. I'm thinking the lemon, which is surprisingly strong given how little zest I used, is reminding me of the vinegar while the salt and sugar are strongly reminiscent of salt and sugar. Both are a tad too strong, actually, so, after I peel off the skin, I'm going to soak the fish in clean water for a few minutes to try to draw a little out. ... OK, now the whitefish flavor is to the fore with subtle hints of the lemon and herbs. It's a more balanced flavor now, but honestly I think I liked it better before. A little finishing salt fixes it right up and now the flavor's popping again. I'm going to slice it up and eat it with cream cheese, red onion, tomato and, lacking pumpernickel bread, crackers. Mmm, tasty.

Fish poached in fresh chile oil

My post, back in March, about slow poaching fish in butter was no doubt received with a chorus of yawns. You guys can read the New York Times as well as I can and don't need me to tell you that adding a handful of scallions to their recipe is a good idea.

This is a variation on that technique using a recipe from another NYTimes article--this one about cooking over wood fires:
"That smoke is a guilty pleasure. It gives so much flavor, it makes most marinades and rubs unnecessary. But a bright and balanced sauce, like the honey-sweetened gremolata in “Seven Fires,” adds a note of sophistication.

"So does the fresh dried chili oil from Russell Moore, the chef and an owner of Camino, in Oakland, Calif., a restaurant where almost everything is cooked with a wood fire. This time of year Mr. Moore grills asparagus and spring onions, then tops them with a chili oil he makes from mild dried New Mexican chilies, pounded garlic and chopped mint. The result has so much body and flavor it’s more salsa than sauce. Mr. Moore describes it as “a super-rough harissa.”

"The recipe is really a template — you can use any mild chili, such as chihuacle or mulatto, and any herb — and drizzle it over whatever vegetable looks good that week, from artichokes to new potatoes to escarole to summer chanterelles. “You want all the freshness of the seasons in there, and three strong flavors,” Mr. Moore said."

I'm not drizzling it over grilled vegetables so at least I've got something original to contribute here.

I used:
2 ancho peppers [Dried poblanos. Quite mild.]
1 clove of garlic
1/4 cup mixed fresh oregano and cilantro leaves
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
salt

I crushed the peppers by hand in a small bowl and added just enough boiling water to cover--no more than a Tablespoon or two--and let it hydrate for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, I crushed the garlic and finely chopped the herbs. When the time was up, I added both the the peppers, mixed in the olive oil and a couple big pinches of salt and let it rest in the refrigerator for a couple hours.

The fish I used was whiting, but something a little firmer would be a better choice. I changed the technique a little this time since I, on a whim, made hash browns while the fish was defrosting and the chile oil's flavors maturing. That meant the pan was hot and had some residual olive oil in it. I took it off the heat and added half an onion coarsely chopped so it could get a little head start in cooking before I added the fish. When it stopped sizzling and the heating element had cooled down I put the pan back on the heat, added about half the chile oil and a couple fillets of the fish, cubed. I let that cook over very low heat for ten minutes, stirring a couple times, before I was happy with the doneness of everything. I spooned a serving over the fried potatoes and added a little fresh chile oil over top.



The fruity flavor the peppers blended with the fruity olive oil and melted into the buttery soft fish which itself blended out into the oil to create a rich sauce. There's no heat, but there's warmth from the peppers that rounds out the flavors nicely. The herbs are subtle--there more as an aroma than an actual flavor. I wouldn't mind if they were stronger. I'd add more next time and maybe warm the mixture up over a low flame briefly to help the flavors infuse. Still, quite nice as is.

Maybe I should have had this with rice or bread to sop up the sauce, but serving it over hash browns actually worked. The fish and onions never browned or crisped so it's nice to have a little caramelized flavor and a bit of crunch. The onions were perfectly al dente, but you want some real crunch too. Also, the potatoes retain their separate flavor while everything else has blended with only minor emphasis if you're eating a piece of fish or onion and it's nice to have a little more variation bite to bite.

Cuban escabeche

Last time I made escabeche, back in September, '08 I mentioned that I wanted to make a Cuban version I had found and then I got distracted by the CSA. But now I've got free reign in choosing my recipes again so I've finally made it. I didn't make the recipe I had picked out back then. Instead, it seemed worth looking around to see what looks appealing to me now. That other recipe has some intriguing differences from what I settled on, so if I come back to the idea I may well give it a shot, but I found the inclusion of lime juice in the recipe I found at Chef4all.com interesting enough to give it the edge.

For those who haven't been reading since last Fall or have lives of your own so don't remember what I was posting about back then, I got interested in variations of cooked pickled fish after trying the Japanese version Nanban Zuke at Shiro's in Seattle.

I made a version of that myself and learned during my research that it evolved from Spanish and Portuguese escabeche dishes. So I made a few versions of that too using shrimp, mahi, and smelt with different results each time.

And now on to the Cuban version. Since I'm only serving myself, I used a single filet of tilapia instead of the two pounds the recipe is designed for. I quartered the rest of the ingredients and since the filet was a bit less than a half pound, I tossed in a few shrimp to make up the difference. Most of you are probably making more than one serving so here's the full unreduced recipe:

Ingredients:
2 cups sunflower oil [I used a light olive oil]
1/2 cup white vinegar
1 teaspoon green peppercorns [I used the pickled sort recommended by, I think, Russell]
http://russelleverett.blogspot.com/
2 bay leaves
1 cup sliced black olives [I considered kalamata since I've got some left over, but they didn't seem right. Instead I used the less briny niçoise.]
1 thinly sliced carrot [I had one tiny CSA carrot languishing in the back of my produce drawer so I used that.]
1 Tbsp. capers
1 tsp. oregano
2 tsp. salt
1 red onion, sliced
2 limes, juiced
1 tsp. sugar
1 cup flour
2 pounds of white fleshed fish fillets
freshly chopped parsley or dill.

1. Add everything but the fish, flour, herbs and half the oil to a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce temperature to low, cover and simmer 10 minutes.

2. Chop the fish into serving pieces, sprinkle with salt and pepper and dredge in flour.

3. Heat the rest of the oil in a medium pan until shimmery. Cook the fish until golden brown and crisp on the outside and just barely cooked through. How long will depend on the thickness of each piece so use your judgment.

4. Line a lidded container with some of the solid bits from the marinade you prepared in step one. Lay out the fish (and the shrimp if you fried up some of that as I did). Add the rest of the solids on top and pour over the liquid. Seal the container and let sit in the refrigerator for up to seven days.

I only left it for one day and gave it a flip after 12 hours since the fish pieces weren't completely submerged. Unlike last time, the oil didn't separate out and solidify. There's nothing I recognize as an emulsifier in there so I'm not sure why that is.

When the day was up I pulled it out of the refrigerator and laid it out all pretty topped with chopped parsley.



This recipe is lighter on the vinegar than the last escabeche I made and I think that works well. The dressing is light and multidimensional--not overwhelmed with tartness. You can still taste the fish through it even though it's just a mild whitefish. The olives, capers, green peppers, even the carrots all contribute elements of flavor. I really like how they're all working together. The lime, on the other hand, is hard to find in there.

The fish have firmed up due to chemical cooking from the acid to a solid, somewhat chewy texture. It's something like canned tuna, but not dried out which helps a lot. The shrimp, on the other hand, got a little mushy. They didn't absorb the flavors as well either. Next time, poach out of the shell instead of a quick fry in the shell.

Shrimp aside, this is really quite lovely and, I've got to admit, rather better than I've come to expect from Cuban cuisine. If this is a legitimate Cuban preparation, I've written them off too soon. I guess I need to go out for a fancy Cuban dinner instead of just eating Cuban junk food from holes in various walls to see what I've been missing. Any recommendations?

CSA week 14 - Tilapia and spring onion confit

I'm not sure "confit" is quite the right word here. Some definitions just say "poached in fat" while others require "poached in its own fat". Obviously, I did the former here as there's not a lot of fat in a tilapia. I didn't want to be imprecise but "Olive oil and butter poached tilapia and spring onion" is kind of long for a title.

Semantics aside, this is based on a recipe for oil poached fish that was in the New York Times a few days ago. I was a bit tired of the kitchen after baking bread and making ice cream today so I was looking around for something not too difficult to make tonight that used at least one of the CSA vegetables along with whatever else I had to hand. And it had to go well with the bread which ruled out some otherwise promising choices. I was about to make a version of a chicken and leeks recipe that really works best with chicken breasts I don't have when I remembered this recipe and how nice scallions and onions are when they get soft and start falling apart after being cooking in butter on low heat. No reason spring onions wouldn't work too.

So I defrosted a tilapia filet and cut it into inch-wide squares which I sprinkled with a little salt and pepper. I also cut one of the spring onions stem to stern, just trimming the ends a little, into half inch pieces.

In a medium pan I heated a Tablespoon of olive oil and a Tablespoon of butter over low heat just until the butter was all melted. Then I added the fish and a spring of rosemary and let cook for five minutes turning down the heat when it started to sizzle. Five minutes was a bit long but my fish wasn't quite entirely defrosted.

When the fish was about halfway to turning opaque I added the spring onion, a minced clove of garlic and a bit more salt and pepper, stirred to coat everything in fat, put on a lid and cooked for another three minutes.

Then I finished it off with a little chopped parsley, a half teaspoon of capers and a squeeze of lemon, removed the rosemary and served.


The onion is still slightly chewy with the thicker pieces retaining just a little crispness while the tilapia is firm but creamily moist. The tilapia's flavor seeped out as it cooked so this is more of an onion dish with an understated fish sauce than fish with an onion sauce. The spring onion tops are just the green bits of the scallion overgrown so you have to like that, but if you do it's a nice match with the other flavors here. The fresh notes of the parsley and capers pair well with the onion, the lemon cuts the fattiness and it all tastes lovely with a few slices of fresh baked multigrain bread. Quick, easy and highlights its ingredients so worth a quick post I figure.

Casamance Stew

This is another recipe that I downloaded from a recipe archive before the Web existed. It's different from the pork and tomatillo stew I made earlier this week in a few interest ways, though. First, because of it's much more unusual name it managed to almost fully colonize it's namespace on the web; all but one "casamance stew" you'll find online is this recipe. Second, I was able to definitely track it back to its origin. This is a variation on a recipe from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook printed in the October 24, 1990 issue of the New York Times. And third, there is no indication that anyone other than I has ever actually cooked it. Not one review, not one comment and the biggest change anyone has made in the recipe is adding paragraph breaks. OK, that's not true; one guy suggests a parsley garnish.

A little research that I really should have done beforehand reveals that Casamance is a region on the south coast of Senegal and that this stew is actually a tinkered up version of poisson yassa. And while I'm sure the good folks in the Moosewood Collective meant well, the yassa recipes look a lot better and there's one change that really screws up this recipe. Let's see if you can see it without prompting.

Ingredients:

Marinade:
1/2 cup fresh lemon or lime juice
1/2 cup white vinegar
2 tablespoons tamari soy sauce (this is clearly a substitute for Maggi seasoning so I used that instead. Click on the Senegalese tag for more info on Maggi seasoning.)
2 tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
3 cloves minced garlic
2 or more jalapeno chiles, seeded, minced

Everything else:
1 1/2 pounds monkfish or other firm fish fillets (I used whiting. According to my notes on the recipe, I used sea bass the first time around.)
4 cups sliced onions
2 cups sweet potatoes, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 teaspoon peanut oil,
1 chopped red bell pepper
salt to taste

1. Combine marinade ingredients (1st 7 items).

2. Rinse the fish well and cut into serving size pieces. Layer about half the onion slices in a glass baking dish. Pour some marinade over them. Then add fish and rest of onions, pour marinade over them. Cover and refrigerate overnight or all day.

3. When ready to cook, set the fish aside. Pour marinade off the onions and set aside. Cover cubed sweet potatoes with cool, salted water, bring to a boil then simmer until just barely tender.

4. Meanwhile, in heavy pan, gently saute onions in peanut oil for 15 minutes. Add red bell pepper and cook for another 5 minutes. Combine onion, bell pepper with sweet potatoes and marinade and simmer 20 minutes.

5. While vegetables simmer, briefly broil or saute fish til lightly browned on both sides.

6. Add fish to simmering vegetables and continue to cook 15 minutes more. Salt to taste.

Serve in wide shallow bowls on steaming rice or millet.



Did you see the problem there? Someone changed the sensible hour marination to a full day. If you have much cooking experience you'll realize that a day in vinegar and lemon juice is going to do some serious pickling to that fish. And if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know that's precisely why I cooked this. Foolishly, perhaps, I assumed that the recipe author knew something I didn't and what looked like a step that would ruin the dish would instead make it something unique and wonderful. I really should have known better.

The fish was badly overcooked chemically before any actual cooking that the recipe calls for. And even if it needed cooking, browning was clearly not going to happen as the fish was waterlogged from its lengthy soak. All the attempt achieved was prompting the fillets to break apart. The 15 minutes of extra cooking time was out of the question.

It's really a shame as, setting the fish's texture aside, the flavor combination is unusual, interesting and not bad at all. The tart sauce brightens up the savory onions and peppers and balances the sweetness of the sweet potato. My salvage attempt on the dish was to treat the fish like salt cod and break it up into chewy flakes. I found that the sauce gets caught up in the flakes so it's more of a hash than a stew at this point and each bite tastes mainly of fish and caramized onion moistened by the sauce. It really tones down the overwhelming vinegariness of the sauce and if the fish didn't taste like canned tuna it would be pretty good.

Doesn't mean I'm going to make it again, though. Next yassa I make is likely to be this one which looks to be different in some rather interesting ways.

Teriyaki tuna and tofu

Here's a dish I threw together tonight that I think turned out well enough to share. I now compulsively photograph everything I cook so even though I didn't know I'd be posting about it until it's done, it's fully documented.

Ingredients:

1 tuna steak, about 1/3 pound - cut in 2 inch cubes
1/3 pound extra firm tofu - cut in 2 inch cubes

marinade:
a few glugs of soy sauce
half as much sake
a generous pinch of brown sugar
finely grated ginger
white pepper
red pepper
(obviously, I didn't measure so I'm not going to make quantities up now)


2 scallions, sliced thin - white and green separated
4 leaves bok choy - sliced thin - stem and leaves separated
1 carrot, in very thin strips

2 eggs

squeeze of lemon
drizzle of sesame oil

white rice, cooked however you cook your white rice


1. Mix the marinade ingredients. Add tuna and tofu. Marinate one hour, turning half way through.

2. Drain marinade into a small bowl and set aside. Pat tuna dry.

3. Heat a Tablespoon of oil to nearly smoking in a medium non-stick pan. Sear tuna for no more than 30 seconds, flip and sear again. Remove.

4. Repeat with tofu for about the same time. Remove to bowl with tuna. Keep someplace warm.

5. Add a bit more oil to the pan as the previous Tablespoon is now all over your stovetop, shirt and glasses. Actually, you might want to go wash your face at this point.

6. Give the oil a moment to heat up then add the bok choy stems and the white part of the scallion. Stir fry until wilted. Add the rest of the vegetables. Stir fry briefly. I let the cabbage get a bit browned for some extra flavor, but it's up to you.

7. Remove pan from heat. Crack in the two eggs and stir to lightly scramble. When eggs are not quite dry, remove to bowl.

8. Pack a bowl with white rice. Top with four cubes of tuna and four of tofu. Add a third of the vegetable mixture. Pour a third of the marinade on and finish with lemon and sesame oil.

If you want a proper restaurant-style teriyaki sauce, you'll want to make a bit more of the marinade, bring it to a boil in a small pot, add no more than a Tablespoon of cornstarch (dissolved in cold water) and let thicken. Personally, I didn't want to let everything else get cold while I did that. But if you're keeping everything someplace warm as I suggested above, it would probably be an improvement.

The tuna and tofu absorbed plenty of flavor from the marinade but still maintained their own character and texture. You could use meat or shrimp instead but then you'd definitely want to boil the sauce for a while. Or you could use all tofu. You could mix and match the vegetables, too. Mushrooms or peppers would work well. Maybe even broccoli, but I think that would throw off the quick cooking and you wouldn't the bright fresh flavors I got.

So, quick, easy and tasty. Fresh and fairly healthy. I'm rather pleased with it.

Escabeche redeemed

This is my follow-up report on my attempt to make a palatable escabeche. You may recall (or you may have clicked on that link, or possibly scrolled down to my previous post) that my attempt at this dish earlier this week didn't work out because I used the wrong fish. Nothing wrong with the brine, though, so I tossed the mahi I used and fried up a smelt and set it to soaking. That's the before picture to the right and the after picture below. The difference in color isn't from the lighting, the brine seems to have bleached the browned flour coating.


It's had three days to pickle so it's time to pull it out and see what's what. The far less mild flavor of the smelt, compared to the mahi, lets it stand up against the pickling brine, and the oily texture means it absorbs less as well. The flavor balance is now much better. The experience is fish enhanced by the spicy vinegary sauce rather than the sauce with some chewy chunks of vaguely fish-flavored stuff. The flour coating, of course, can't retain its crispness after absorbing moisture from the brine. But the smelt's bones stay crisp which adds a lot of texture to the dish. It's, overall, pretty darn good. So that was a classic Spanish-style preparation. Now I want to try the Cuban version I also found with the olives, capers and cider vinegar.

Mahi escabeche

A while back, when I made shrimp escabeche, I wasn't entirely satisfied with the results. Oh, it was tasty enough, but my experiences with nanban zuke, the Japanese dish that evolved from escabeche, indicated that one important part of the dish was the interaction of the pickling vinaigrette and the yummy browned bits on fried fish. And since the shrimp was poached, it was lacking.

So, on a sudden whim I decided that today was the day to scratch that culinary itch and give fish escabeche a try. I chose this recipe, although if I hadn't already polished off my latest purchase of olives I would have made this one instead.

The procedure is pretty simple. First, skip the brining and just salt the pickling sauce. If you're going to let the fish soak for a while, it'll all work out the same.

Flavor the oil with the garlic, pepper and bay leaf.








Brown slices of fish.









Sweat the onion.









Cook down the sauce.










Combine and let sit in the refrigerator for a day or two.






It comes out looking nice (partially because I changed some settings on my phone-camera at my first attempt at deliberately making it look better than real life. Yes, my first food porn picture and it's still blurry. I think I need a proper camera if I'm going to keep this up.)

Mahi, it turns out, is definitely the wrong fish for the job. Something oily--swordfish or orange roughy, maybe sardines--would have both stood up better to the frying and had enough flavor to stand up to the vinegar and spices. The mahi turned into dry chewy bland fish-sticks. The pickling sauce I've got no complaints about. It's tart and rich and subtly spiced, but it needs something to bounce off of to work right.

I've got some spare smelt in the freezer. I'm going to fish out the mahi (I waited a day to do this and the mahi was much improved by the extra soaking time. The texture was a bit moister and flavors had become bright and citrusy. I'll have to give the smelt at least three days of pickling time to be fair.) and fry up a test smelt for some compare-and-contrast. Check back in with my in a few days for the results.

CSA - Chermoula baked tilapia

This was another CSA Summer ad hoc week. I went out to Theine early so I could get my pick of the bananas; a variety of varietals were offered and I wanted to get some of each. I was early enough to meet Margie before she finished the drop-off. We got sidetracked into talking about this blog and another person making a pick-up asked, but I wanted to thank her for all her effort in making the CSA work (and since she said she reads the blog I've got this second chance). It's easy to limit the support in CSA to the money we pay, but we should remember that the C stands for community not consumer. The least I can do is thank her.

Beyond the bananas, some really big tilapia were on offer this week. I've talked about scaling and gutting before I think so I'll skip that this time around. I do think I'm approaching competence at it.

Tilapia is a pretty mild fish--particularly when it's farmed--so I knew I had to really boost the flavor. I decided to go with a North African spice blend that is often used with white fish: chermoula. The formula for chermoula is one of those that's different in every village. I looked a few different ones to get a sense of the range and, as usual, went the over-complicated route. Here's my recipe:

1 small handful parsley, finely chopped
1 small handful cilantro, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
1 small hot pepper, finely chopped (I believe I used a birdseye)
1 teaspoon hot paprika
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 Tablespoon white vinegar
3 Tablespoons fruity olive oil
juice of 1 lemon

I mixed all that up, put the fish in a baking dish, cut three slits in each side and then poured the chermoula over top and stuffed some into the body cavity too. Then I let the fish marinate for a couple hours, turning every half hour or so.

Then I preheated the over to 350 degrees, scraped up all the solid bits of the chermoula and fully stuffed the fish, put the squeezed lemon into the pan (plenty of flavor left in it I figure), covered it with foil and baked for 40 minutes flipping the fish at 20.

And the result is this:

No pictures of a serving; sorry. The fish is falling-apart tender and spectacularly moist, but also full of tiny bones so it collapsed as I picked through it and the result is a heap of soggy fish bits on a bowl of couscous. Quite unsightly. Textural issues aside, the tilapia is infused with the aromatic flavors of the lemon, herbs and spices but not entirely overwhelmed by them. I'd say the flavor of the fish was an equal partner with the flavor of the chermoula. That aspect, at least, was a great success. I wonder if the texture of tilapia would respond better to broiling than a braise. Or maybe cutting five minutes off the cooking time would do the trick.

There was surprisingly little meat for a fish this size, but I did save a little bit for a salad tomorrow and all those bones should make a decent stock so I should get a few meals out of it anyway.

Smelt nanban zuke

If that name looks familiar it's because it's one of the dishes I had at Shiro's while I in Seattle.
I liked it a lot when I had it there and it looked straightforward enough so I thought I'd try to make it at home. If you don't want to click through, basically we're talking about deep-fried pieces of smelt in a vinegary sauce topped with a garnish of onion and pepper. Luckily, my visit to Shiro's was a couple weeks back so I have no real recollection of how it tasted there. I wouldn't want to put my version up to a direct comparison.

I looked around a bit for a recipe right after I went to Shiro's and settled on this one I found at Chilies Down Under although I couldn't tell you why at this remove:
"Nanban Zuke

Marinade

• 2 tblsp light soy sauce
• 1 small chilli (serrano, birds eye, etc) seeded and finely chopped
• 2 tblsp sake
• 700g mackerel fillets, cut into bite-sized pieces
• cornflour
• oil for frying

Sauce

• 0.5 cup rice vinegar
• 0.5 cup sugar
• 0.3 cup water
• 1 teasp salt
• 1 tablsp sake
• 1 small chilli (serrano, birds eye, etc) seeded and finely chopped
• 1 tablsp light soy sauce

Garnish

• 2 spring onions, finely chopped
• 0.5 small green capsicum, cut into thin strips
• 1 cayenne chilli seeded and finely slivered
• a few slices frish ginger, cut into slivers

Combine the sake, light soy sauce and chilli in a bowl and marinade the mackerel in it in a fridge for around 20 minutes. Take out the fish and let it drain for a minute. Dust with cornflour and fry in the oil in a frying pan until golden brown.

Blend the sauce ingredients together, place the fish in a serving dish, and pour the sauce over the fish.

Pour boiling water over the spring onion, capsicum, and chilli, leave for 30 seconds, then drain. Sprinkle the spring onion, capsicum, chilli, and ginger over the fish."

The author calls it a "classic example of the Japanese style" but "nanban" translates as "southern barbarian" if you believe Wikipedia. This article (which is pretty interesting nanban aside) explains that this dish evolved from Spanish or Portuguese escabeche, another dish I need to get around to making at some point.

I made a few adjustments to bring this recipe more in line with Shiro's. First, instead of mackerel fillets, I used whole (well whole-ish, they'd been beheaded and gutted) smelt cut into bite-sized pieces. I was hoping to find fresh smelt somewhere as Florida is known for its smelt, but I only found frozen at Whole Foods so that's what I used. Where the recipe says "cornflour" I assumed it meant cornstarch not cornmeal. I used chili oil instead of fresh chili in the sauce to better distribute the flavor. And I substituted slivers of sweet onion for the chopped scallion. And finally, I made sure everything was deeply chilled instead of room temperature

Since I wasn't using fillets I probably should have lengthened the marination. Twenty minutes wasn't enough for more than a bit of heat to soak in. Wilting the onion probably wasn't necessary; I liked the crispness of the onions at Shiro's.

Shiro's served the dish alone, but I served it over rice. I made a last minute decision to sushify my rice (1 1/2 T rice vinegar, 1 T sugar and 1/2 T salt for each cup of uncooked rice. Rinse the rice well; sushi rice should stick together because of the additions not because of starch. You might add a piece of kombu to the rice cooker too if you're thinking that far ahead.) so I went light on the sauce to keep the dish from getting too vinegary. Overall, a pretty nice summer dish. Cool, light, tart and not too much time or trouble in the kitchen. A green salad with that Japanese style dressing and some hot sake would accompany it nicely.