Bluefish Timgad
Sliced thinly enough and given the right recipe, a bluefish fillet can become a thing of beauty.
(By Mark Gail -- The Washington Post)
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An occasional series in which staff members share a recipe that we turn to time and again:
Big ocean bluefish might as well be zucchini to a cook on holiday by the sea: bounty with a limited audience. Who wants more, kids?
[Recipe: Bluefish Timgad]
True, the so-called "blue-collar game fish" of the East Coast puts up a fun fight on the back of the boat. But the resulting oily, thick, dark-flesh fillets submitted to the kitchen can easily overwhelm regular rubs and spices, and baking or sauteing brings out a strong aroma. An outdoor grilling and squeeze of lemon are standard options.
I pretty much whiffed for several oceanside summers, until I found satisfaction in a recipe for bluefish scaloppine, of all things, from chef Jean-Charles Berruet. He and his wife, Anne, owned the Chanticleer, an elegant French restaurant on Nantucket Island, Mass., for more than three decades. When Berruet, now in his mid-sixties, came to the States from France in 1970 as a private chef for Gourmet magazine founder-publisher Earle McAusland, he'd never faced a bluefish head-on.
"I tried covering it with mayonnaise or onions or tomatoes, but that was just camouflage," he recently recalled while on vacation in Burgundy.
He learned to deal with it soon enough, since blues and food snobs ran in abundance around the island. "To me, it was a perfect challenge for a French chef, because it called for taking common food and elevating it," he said.
I ordered it as a customer, and after the recipe was published in his restaurant cookbook I made the dish at least once each August, just because I could. And it was good.
Some food purists fault the French penchant for turning ingredients into something else. With bluefish, it's the way to go. Berruet hit upon a high-class treatment that's not hard to do: fillets sliced as thin as possible, a marinade with a distinctive North African spice profile (remembered from days he spent in Algeria as a young cook). The marinade cooks down with a pound of tomatoes and some fish stock, turning into a mellow sauce with depth and a little heat. Light dips in flour and egg form the scaloppine, which is sauteed and served with the warm sauce.
The Berruets kept Bluefish Timgad on the menu, where it found a following of appreciative customers who would call beforehand to see if the chef had made enough. He still gets a kick out of remembering that.
The couple sold the restaurant a few years back and moved to the Florida Keys, where they opened a much smaller and more informal restaurant called ChantiCleer South. The blues don't run in the same big numbers near Islamorada, so the chef uses the same technique on mahi-mahi instead.
