Michael Symon's Live to Cook_ Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen - Michael Symon [58]
It starts out exactly like a sauté until it is flipped; once it’s seared on one side, it’s turned in the pan and then slid into a hot oven to finish cooking. Not only is the air surrounding the meat hot and helping the whole cut to cook evenly, but your stove, hands, and attention are freed up and can be turned to other work. At the restaurant, the ovens are turned to full blast to accommodate all the opening and closing throughout service. At home you can have a little more control over your oven temperature. Meats can go into an oven anywhere between 350° and 425°F. Fish, again, benefits from lower temperatures, 250°F or so. (If you can’t put your pans in the oven because they have plastic handles, you need new pans with proper handles.)
When the food is cooked, either by the sauté or the pan-roast method, remove it from the heat. Fish is done at this point, but not meat. Cooked meat must rest so that the juices can redistribute themselves within the muscle and so that the temperature of the meat, which is concentrated on the surface, evens out throughout the meat. Resting is every bit as important to the cooking as the application of the heat. Make sure you allot time for it in your game plan. I recommend resting meat a few minutes per pound.
SLASH-AND-BURN GROUPER
This was another one of those cult-classic kind of dishes at Lola, so simple but so tasty: grouper seasoned inside with Jamaican jerk paste. It was just a theory for a long time, a dish that one of my good chef buddies, David Adjey, and I would talk about and wanted to try—slashing a piece of fish in the middle and putting something spicy inside. He does a similar dish with shrimp. At Lola we serve this fish with Crab Tater Tots, a crab guacamole, or a bell pepper salad.
Serves 6
6 6-ounce skin-on black grouper fillets
2 tablespoons Busha Browne’s Jamaican Authentic Jerk Seasoning (see Symon Says)
1 teaspoon olive oil
Kosher salt
½ cup shrimp stock or Shellfish Stock
Juice of 2 limes
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 roasted red bell pepper, peeled, seeded, and finely diced
½ cup fresh cilantro leaves
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
Cut a pocket horizontally through the fish about 2 inches wide and 2 inches deep, and spread about a teaspoon of jerk seasoning in each fillet. Heat an ovenproof sauté pan over medium heat and when it is hot, add the olive oil. Pat the fillets dry with a paper towel (so that they won’t stick to the pan), season lightly with salt, and lay them in the hot pan. Let the fish brown for 3 minutes and then gently turn them. Place the pan in the oven for 3 to 5 minutes, until the fish has reached an internal temperature of 140 °F.
Remove the pan from the oven and transfer the fillets to warm plates. Add the stock and lime juice to the pan, bring to a simmer, and reduce by half, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in the butter and then the bell pepper. Pour over the fillets and garnish with cilantro leaves.
I love jerk seasoning and used to make my own from a mixture of habaneros, cilantro, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, shallot, and garlic. But Busha Browne’s Authentic Jerk Seasoning, available in grocery stores and specialty markets, is excellent for this dish.
BACON-WRAPPED PAN-ROASTED WALLEYE
In Cleveland we love our walleye, a rich white flavorful fish from the Great Lakes. When I was named one of the ten best new chefs in 1998 by Food & Wine magazine, they asked me for a recipe. I sent them one for walleye and it threw everyone off. New York fishmongers couldn’t find it and they all wanted to call it walleyed pike. There is walleye and there is pike but it is not walleyed pike. Walleye is practically our native fish,