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!