This dish was supposed to be for black cod, but that costs a fortune and comes from the other side of the country. Normally I’m in Montreal where it’s only halfway across the country to the Alaskan waters where this buttery fish is caught wild, but I was making the dish while in Newfoundland, which really is the other side of the continent. Actually, it’s OFF the continent! No way was I going to pay $30 for 2 lbs of black cod fillet (I did a double batch – 1 lb is enough to serve four in the recipe in “Good Fish” by Becky Selengut) even if I could get my paws on them out east.
You can maybe get a black cod from Iceland or something, but Seachoice doesn’t like that on their website so I don’t know how sustainable it would be.
I’m not 100% sure about how sustainable the turbot was either, but its stocks are good at least, so what I’m concerned about is the fishing method. It may be trawled, which is really not good for the ocean floor, but I trust this fish guy at the Fish Depot on Duckworth Street (he hates farmed Atlantic salmon as much as I do) and boy does turbot taste a lot like black cod. It’s fatty and buttery and melt-in-your-mouth delicious. And nobody seems to know about it, which is a good sign both for its stocks and for its price.
Back to the recipe – this is an amazing dish. A bed of shredded cabbage, bok choy, and tomato halves sprinkled with salt, green onions, sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, and thinly sliced lime. You’re supposed to do individual piles of the vegetables on a baking sheet with aluminum foil lining it (to keep portions separate in a cute kind of way), but I just lined the whole baking sheet with the stuff. There was no difference except I had to stir the vegetables after the first 15 of the 20 minutes of roasting because the bok choy leaves were starting to shrivel.
The other thing I changed about the recipe was that you’re supposed to then place the four equal portions of filleted, seasoned turbot (black cod) on each parcel of partially roasted vegetables and drizzle with the soy sauce and 1 tbsp of the soy-caramel sauce (sake, mirin, soy sauce, sugar, and lemon juice brought to a boil and finished with 1/4 cup of cold butter – Franco-Japanese style). Then you serve the rest of the soy-caramel sauce on the side. But I figured that would be messy for a buffet-type party, so I poured the entire soy-caramel sauce over the fish! So they got a fairly heavy butter-bath, and thus became inevitably delicious…I mean, I’m sure the 1 tbsp would have been fine, and I’m a big fan of serving dipping sauces on the side so you can taste the sauce with every bite instead of having the flavour get lost in, or cooked into, the dish. But this way I was pretty much guaranteed success (in a “bad cook” kind of way), and most of the sauce would drip to the bottom of the serving dish anyway – perfect for ambitious bread dipping guests. Sadly (for them), no one seemed to catch on to my genius bread-in-butter-sauce dipping idea. Fortunately (for me), people were more into the fish than the cabbage and bok choy (which I thought were to die for, swimming in butter as they were), and I ended up with a few days worth of butter-soaked deliciousness all to myself.
Making the fish is ridiculously easy. You roast the vegetables topped with the seasoned and optionally filleted fish (I didn’t even cut them “into equal portions” as indicated in the recipe since it didn’t matter and a big single piece of fish makes for a more awing presentation) for another 8-10 minutes, until it’s just flaking. All the butter and Omega 3 fatty acids in the fish are going to make this an easy fish to cook and a hard fish to overcook, so it’s very, very forgiving.
Which is important if you’re me. And maybe also if you’re you…
I even did the wine pairing in the book. A Savennières from the Loire Valley in France. Well, I guess I sort of did the wine pairing. Turns out you can’t get a Savennières at liquor stores in Newfoundland…thanks, Rock. But you can get a Sauvion from the Loire. Is it similar? Not really. Savennières are from Chenin Blanc grapes but they’re very dry, so the Chenin Blanc we had at the party would have been too sweet even if I’d thought about it at the time and not had to reference wikipedia like a newbie. A Vouvray would have been an okay choice apparently. So the Sauvion-tubot in soy-caramel sauce pairing didn’t really work. The other pairing suggestion of a Pinot Gris from Oregon such as Eyrie Vineyards 2007 was pretty hopeless in Newfoundland anyway. Ah well. The dish was better without the wine anyway. SHH! Don’t tell any sommeliers!
Buy this book. Make this recipe. Invite me for dinner. Please. Funny, I feel I may have written these very words before…
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