Miso-marinated Sablefish with Torrontes Sunchoke Espresso Reduction

This recipe gets a little fucking fancy. Nothing about it involves any real technical prowess, but there are a bunch of elements and it takes a lot of fucking time.

Here’s what you’ll need first:

Sauce – you can’t find this shit in a fucking jar, so you’ll have to go buy some ingredients. Here’s some suggestions, keeping in mind that all measurements are approximations and are more than likely inaccurate:

An onion – this is a pretty accurate measurement, actually. For this purpose you can cut the onion any ol’ way you fucking please. There won’t be any onion on the plate; all the solid ingredients will be strained from the sauce prior to the final reduction and mounting.

Some sunchoke – an amount about equal to your onion, perhaps a bit more, cut any ol’ fucking way - also called Jerusalem artichoke, theses little gems are becoming much more common in supermarkets so shouldn’t be too tough to round up. If you can’t find ‘em you can probably substitute something else, but I wouldn’t worry about it – the sauce can still be delicious without them.

4 cloves garlic, chopped – don’t use the pre-chopped canned junk or a garlic press. The pre-fab shit is flavourless, and using a press removes the flavourful oils from the garlic and leaves them stuck in the press. Get out your knife and chop that shit yourself.

A bottle of wine – you only need a cup for the recipe, the rest is purely recreational. I used a delightful white called Torrontes – strong evidence that there is more to Argentina than Malbec and Patagonia.

4 cups vegetable stock – or 3? I don’t fucking know. It’s an eyeballed measurement for sure.

½ teaspoon ground espresso – this may seem like a strange ingredient, and the strong coffee smell when you add it may mislead you into thinking you’ve just made espresso sauce, but trust me, it works perfectly.

2 tablespoons cold butter cut into little cubes – this is for mounting your sauce, so make sure you keep it cold. I once overheard a dumb broad, working professionally as an executive chef, tell her line staff to use melted butter for the buerre blanc to speed things up. This dumb broad is no longer employed as a professional chef. You can’t mount sauce with melted butted – it just doesn’t fucking work.

There, that’s all you need.
Now cook that shit into a yummy sauce.

“Um, li’l help.”

Oh, right.

Heat a large saucepan on medium. When hot, add a tablespoon or so of oil and throw in your onion – it should sizzle, if it didn’t your pan wasn’t hot yet. Season with salt and pepper and let cook for a minute or so while you get your sunchoke together.
Throw that sunchoke in there. Add a bit more salt and stir that shit up. Let the whole mess cook until things start to get mushy. Add your garlic. When you can smell the garlic in the mix, after about a minute, it’s done. You don’t wanna burn garlic – burnt garlic is awful, so add your veg stock now. Use just enough to cover your veg. Let it simmer on medium heat until reduced by one half – about 30-40 minutes.

“30-40 minutes?!?”

Yes, 30-40 minutes. I told you this shit takes some time, and it’s going to be even longer than that.

When your sauce has reduced, it’s time to add the wine – about a cup. You can use different types of wine in this sauce depending on the flavour profile you’re going for. I went with the standard “white fish, white wine” pairing, selecting the Torrontes for its nice citrus tones (I’m no wine expert; that’s what is said on the fucking label. I seldom buy wines that don’t tell me what they taste like on the label – I’m classy like that).

Let your sauce simmer for about 20 minutes. Strain off the veg using a fine sieve and add the espresso. Let it simmer for about another 10-20 minutes, tasting all the while. Mount your sauce.

“Ummmm, what?”

It’s a culinary term, not a bizarre sexual notion. Put your pants back on.

Turn the sauce to low and add the butter, melting one little cube at a time until you have a glistening little pot of awesome.
Mounted.

Top your fish with it.

“What fucking fish?”

The fucking sablefish.
Didn’t you read the title?

You can use whatever fish you like for this recipe, but sablefish is the best. Sablefish is fucking awesome. It’s also called black cod, but sablefish sounds way more badass and it sounds more exotic and delicious.

Sablefish is also easy as fuck to cook, as is most fish, but with the distinct advantage that it’s actually pretty hard to overcook.
Fish like salmon and halibut have a much smaller window between undercooked and overcooked – that little spot called ‘perfectly cooked’.
Here’s how I cook it:
First, I make miso soup.

“What? You need a fucking snack first?”

It’s for the marinade, Shithat.

You’ll want to make your soup from scratch, using miso paste, as a premade soup will have too much water – we’re making a marinade, not a soup. I use a heaping tablespoon of paste to about 1½ cups of water (if it looks like too much water, I just reduce it). Add a small piece of kombu to the mix and about a teaspoon of fresh ginger. Bring it to a boil then remove from heat and let cool. You want to make sure it’s cool as it’s being added to fish and we're not poaching it. This isn’t a poached dish, but a miso-poached fish dish does sound like a pretty good idea.

Ideally, you’ll have read this whole post prior to starting dinner so you’ll know that you should do the marinade well before making the sauce.

I tend to write things out ass fucking backwards. It’s more fun.

Let your fish marinate for an hour or two while you make your sauce.

Another thing you can do while you’re waiting for that sauce to reduce is to make a fun and tasty garnish.

Here’s how.

Get yourself a sweet potato – one of the orange ones.
“Isn’t that a yam?”
No, it’s a fucking sweet potato. All of those things in the sweet potato section at the grocery store that are labeled ‘yams’ are fucking sweet potatoes. The term ‘yam’ is a stupid grocers' convention to distinguish between varieties of sweet potato. The fucking idiots that came up with it didn’t think to use colours, or perhaps a name that isn’t actually a different vegetable entirely, to distinguish them.
Fucking asstards.

Anyhow, select a SWEET POTATO that isn’t too bumpy; a long, skinny, relatively smooth one is ideal. To form your chips, lay your sweet potato flat, take a vegetable peeler, and run it the length of the sweet potato. 

Repeat.

You’ll be left with nice strips of sweet potato, perfect for fryin'!

Heat your deep fryer to 375F. If you don’t have a deep fryer, as I don’t, you can use a pot on the stove, but be careful. Make sure to use a decent sized pot and to leave lots of room for the oil to expand – by lots of room I mean at least two time the volume of your oil. Safety first. Also, cleaning up oil is a huge pain in the ass.

Cook your sweet potato strips a few at a time. Don’t overload, and give the oil a minute or two between batches to recover. Pull them out of the oil just when they brown on the edges – about 30 seconds. Let them drain on some kitchen paper and set them aside for plating later. Try not to eat them all. Or don’t. Eat them all. I don’t care.

Now what else are we having with this dish? I seem to recall saying that it was a bit complex.

Oh right, rice and veg.

The rice isn’t that important. It’s a pretty minor element of the dish.

Use whatever rice you like, and cook it how you like it.
I used bamboo rice. It's a Japanese short-grain rice that’s been infused with bamboo juice. It’s a cool green colour, but I don’t notice a significant different between it and regular Japanese short-grain rice. I cook it just like I do basmati – a 1:1.5 rice to water ratio, brought to a boil, covered and simmered on low for 10 minutes, and then left to stand for 5.

Veg.

I like carrots. Carrots are fucking awesome. Let’s make carrots.
Let’s do bok choy too!
Shanghai bok choy!  (sweet battle cry, no?)

Use as much as you think you need. I’m cooking for two so I used 2 carrots and two bok choy. Your preferences may vary.

I like to chop my carrots into inconsistent shapes by rolling the carrot as I chop. As for the little bok choys, I just halve them lengthwise.

In a bowl, combine 2 teaspoons of clarified butter – or just plain ol’ melted butter – with a clove of garlic, a teaspoon of fresh grated ginger, a touch of crushed chill, and a pinch of salt and fresh cracked black pepper.

Have a steamer setup ready to rock when you begin to cook your fish. Steam the veg for about 30 seconds to a minute. Remove from heat and toss them in the garlic and ginger bowl and cover.

Now, at long last, back to our sablefish. It ought to be nicely marinated by now, and should no longer be white but rather more of a miso colour. Preheat your oven to 425F. Throw a cast iron pan on the stove and get it hot. Toss some oil in the hot pan. If you’re using olive oil, make sure to cut it with some vegetable oil – sunflower, saffron, peanut, or whatever – as olive oil has a low smoke point and will burn as soon as it hits that hot pan. Lay your fish in the pan skin side down, touching the side of the fillet nearest you first, and laying it away from you to avoid oil splashing at you. Safety first. Immediately turn off the heat, remove your pan from the element and throw it in the oven until springy to the touch – about 8-10 minutes. Don’t flip it; you don’t need to. Now’s a good time to take care of that veg.

Pull your fish and dress up your plates. I like to use a ring mold to form my rice as a pedestal in the middle of my plate, but you can do your plate however you like.

Presentation is important.

You see your food before you taste it and an elegant presentation only adds to the dining experience. Also, it shows your dining mate(s) that you care about their food and thus, by extension, them.

Normally, I would plate my fish directly on top of the rice, but this time I decided to fold my bok choy on the rice and place the fish on top of that. It worked, and looked nice, but balancing the fish on the bok choy was a bit of a pain. I just put the carrots on the side after saucing the fish.

Now, take some of those sweet potato chips from earlier – if you didn’t eat them all while waiting for your food to cook. You probably got some chips that curled up when you fried 'em and some that didn’t. The curly ones make for the most fun presentation – like a little, silly crown for your fish, turning your plate into a Neptunian homage.

What fun!

It's bordering on pageantry, I know.

Eat it.