Lessons Learned From a Weekly Fish Dinner

This next post presents a bit of a challenge for me, as it has to do with a recent cooking/eating experience - last night's to be more exact - that left me rather disappointed. Nevertheless I had every intention of writing about it 24 hours ago, so I'm going to do my best to try to unvail three culinary lessons in as interesting and informational manner as possible.

For the Bothe parents' and youngest daughter's weekly seafood and/or fish dinner, my mom chose a farm-raised fillet of Steelhead Trout, which to her credit had the appearance, smell, and texture of a fresh and flavorful fish. The fillet was nice and firm, presented no fishy odor, and had the intense pink color of its wild salmon neighbor in the display case. Thus, there was hope for our dinner...

When I knew I would get the opportunity to prepare our dinner for this particular Sunday evening, I decided I wanted to try out a few techniques that I had not used since working in a kitchen professionally - a term I should say that I use rather loosely, as I never considered myself a professional cook and/or chef! First I decided that I would cook the fillet "Meuniere" style, which essentially means seasoning a fillet of fish (Sole is the standard) and then dredging it in flour before frying it in a rather ample amount of butter and serving it with a sauce that you make of browned butter, lemon, and parsely. Because we seem to have an overlly sensitive smoke detector at the moment, I decided that I would opt to use clarified butter for the frying and accompanying sauce. To me the process of clarifying butter seems to always be made more intimidating and complex than necessary. In essense clarifying butter is the process of removing the milk solids from the butter piece so that all you are left with is a clear yellow fat. I guess there are many ways to go about this process, but for me it just seems easiest to melt the necessary quantity of butter in a saucepan over gentle heat just until it has all turned to liquid. At this stage there will be milk solids that have separated to the top and bottom of the pan, so the way I proceed is to just skim off the top white solids with a spoon, and pour out as much of the golden yellow fat as possible into a measuring cup before the remaining milky substance dribbles in as well.

So, after having prepared my butter, I was ready to put the pan on the stove and heat it to a medium high temperature (approximately 400 degrees). I then nimbly removed the skin from the fillet, seasoned both sides, and incidently completely forgot about the dredging stage, but given that this is more a stage for the finished texture of the dish than anything else, it did not have a tremendous impact on my end result. Once my fillet was prepped and ready to go, I proceeded to put a piece of parchment paper into the heated pan. This is a little trick I used a lot in my previous work experience in the pan-cooking of most of the fish with which I worked. Obviously if you have access to a non-stick pan the trick is a little redundant, but given that our non-stick was not large enough to hold the fillet I had to opt for another pan that the fish most certainly would have adhered to if I had not positioned the piece of parchment. Next I poured the clarified butter into the pan and let it heat up amply before adding the fish. Most fish will cook very quickly in this process, and actually for most fish it's almost better to undercook it as the hot sauce that is applied once it is on the serving platter will finish off the cooking. You do need to turn the fish in the pan though so that it does cook on both sides - this proved rather tricky for me as my fillet was rather large and required two spatulas to turn it without breaking the flesh. Once both sides had been seared I removed the fillet to a warmed platter and returned the pan to the heat so that my butter could turn a shade darker - to a nut brown color - before I added the lemon juice and parsly.

At this point I immediately called my parents to the table, grabbed the prepared side dishes, and presented the main platter (this sounds way more formal than it actually was, trust me). I devided out our portions using a spoon to ladle over the beautifully browned lemon parsly butter and was tremendously eager to take my first bite, which was when I discovered utter disappointment. Although the bite of flaky flesh had the expected succulent buttery component to it, the fish itself lacked any flavor to match. My mouth was invaded by lifelessness, and I was not happy! I contented myself with soaking up every bit of the butter fat that remained both in my plate and in the platter, but the meal still felt lost.

The bit of reasearch I have executed this evening suggests that farmed fish will most often always be inferior not only in flavor, but in nutritional value and environmental sustainability as well. These "harvested" fish are fed not what they would eat naturally, but pellets that contain the following: antibiotics that have agents that have been proven harmful to humans; colorings to make them the color of their wild counterparts when really the food they eat renders them an unappetizing grey color; and other chemically produced substances that are no where near the nutritional value for them or us of their natural diets.
Thus, was my harshly disappointing experience eating farmed fish. For ethical reasons I obviously can't promote always choosing wild over farm-raised, but from now on I am going to be even pickier... My parents will be so happy!

Low and Slow: Rediscovering the Flavor of Meat

Within the past few months I have really questioned whether I truly have a carnivore within me, or if I simply have a gastronome's palette that allows me to appreciate the likes of charcuterie, foie gras, and other animal delicacies rather than those of steaks and similar chunks of meat. The question came to me initially when I couldn't experience the sensation of my mouth watering at the thought, sight, or taste of my dad's birthday sirloin grilled on the the BBQ. Instead what had me excited about the dinner was my mom's Bearnaise that I would pretty much eat by the spoonful as I slathered my every bite of meat, as well as the pomme-de-terre saute also prepared masterfully by my mom and also dipped into the decadent Bearnaise. As time went on in 2010 I found that my tastes in meat did in fact lie strictly within the limits of charcuterie and, oddly enough, the more obscure parts of the animal typically categorized as offal when prepared as edible delights- namely tongue, liver, and bone marrow. Then in Las Vegas - where for my birthday dinner I ate at Alex (for Chef Alessandro Stratta) - I chose for my main course a "Tenderloin of Wagyu Beef 'Rossini with Potato Gnocchi, Root Spinach, and Aged Parmigiano," and quickly felt myself let down by my own palette. Incidentally, I could not have been less stimulated by the seemingly exquisite flavors and textures of perhaps the world's finest beef. Don't get me wrong, I had the utmost appreciation for the meat's origins, tenderness, and masterful manner in which it was prepared; but unless I had the foie gras to go with it on the fork, I simply found little interest in the meat itself. It was thus how half a piece of Wagyu tenderloin sat by itself on an otherwise spotless plate - wiped clean by a piece of bread as is my typical fashion - and how my dinner partner was offered his own chance to dine on a rare culinary delight.
OK, so where am I going with this? Well, a few weeks ago my mom and I made a Sunday trip to the Hanover Coop in search of our dinner for the evening. My mom made an enquiry at the butchery about getting a locally-sourced piece of pork, which was how we came away with a bone-in shoulder end roast (one that included the very tip of the loin and rib bones) and corresponding instructions to cook it at a low temperature over several hours. Needless to say I had been rather unenthusiastic about the thought of a pork roast for dinner, but given my keen desire to continue my cooking self-education - especially in the meat domain - I was rather eager to have a go at preparing our Sunday roast.
The preparation of the pork was really easy. I combined a couple of tablespoons of olive oil with some garlic, thyme, and essential seasoning then rubbed the mixture onto the exterior of the 2.5 pounds of meat that had already been trimmed of any excess fat. I then placed the roast into a preheated 350-degree oven and simply let it be for a near 2 hours until it reached a temperature of, more or less, 155 degrees. At this point I could remove it from the oven and let it rest on a cutting board for about 10 minutes while I deglazed the cooking pan and prepared an accompanying jus. Immediately before serving I brought out my very infrequently used carving set and proceeded to cut the roast into thick slices between the rib bones. Low and behold and much to my pleasure I began to salivate, and wholly welcomed the decadent sight of juicy and tenderly-cooked meat. Moreover when I sat down to completely indulge in the tasting experience of my roast, I hardly noticed the jus or anything else on my plate so much I was captivated by the pure flavors of the local, naturally-raised meat.
If that experience alone wasn't enough to convince me that meat does in fact hold a very desirable appeal to me, I have since roasted a whole chicken in a similar low and slow fashion following the ideas of a recipe I found in Italian Two Easy, Simple Recipes from the London River Cafe, by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. Although I chose to enhance the flavor of my local free-range 3.5 pound chicken with fresh sprigs of tarragon and garlic rather than the rosemary and sage the recipe called for, and only rubbed 1 tablespoon of butter onto the skin rather than the instructed 10, I pretty much obeyed the cooking instructions to the letter. After preheating the oven to 200 degrees, cleaning the chicken, and seasoning and stuffing the cavity with my enhancers; I placed the chicken up-side-down in a heavy-duty pan, added a little under a cup of water, and put the lot into the oven for the first hour. For hour two I turned the chicken onto its right side, and for hour three onto its left. For the final stage I removed the chicken from the oven, turned the oven up to 400 degrees, rubbed my tablespoon of butter into the chicken, seasoned it, and added half a cup of dry vermouth to the pan. The chicken then went back into the oven for a final half hour at the higher temperature to obtain a golden hue and crisp exterior. Exactly as with the pork, the flavor, tenderness, and juiciness, of the chicken was incomparable to a lot of the roast chickens I've had in my past.
Although I have no doubt that a meat's best flavors and textures may truly be obtained via other cooking methods, I think mine is a palette strictly for the low and slow method. Here's to a lot of advanced planning, simple preparation, and, I say this with truth, meaty goodness!!!