FIXING FISH
Cooking for shaky chefs with a finny phobia, including fresh or foul, fat or lean, done or devastated, four baking techniques, recipes.
For shaky chefs with a finny phobia.
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By Carol Taylor
PHOTOGRAPHS © GRANT PETERSON
Last summer, when MOTHER'S editor in chief returned from
North Carolina's Outer Banks with a freezerful of yellowfin
tuna, he shared his catch with the editorial staff.
Everyone applauded his skill and praised his generosity.
Then, all afternoon, editors and illustrators skulked into
my office, muttering, "How do you cook this stuff?"
There's nothing like raw fish for intimidating perfectly
competent cooks. Assured with soufflés, blasé
with béarnaise, they shrink from a sea bass. And no
wonder: Fish is badly cooked so consistently that the means
of preparing it can seem as unfathomable as the waters it
came from.
Actually, fixing fish requires neither elaborate equipment
nor complicated technique. If you can bake, broil, fry and
simmer, you can produce superb seafood. When dinner goes
awry, it's usually because 1) the fish isn't fresh, 2) the
cooking method doesn't match the species or 3) the fish
overcooks. All these pitfalls are easy to avoid.
Fresh or Foul?
Fish is the most perishable of foods—delightful on
Monday, rank on Thursday. The "fishy flavor" that keeps so
many people loyal to pork chops is the taste of
old fish. And once fish has turned, no sauce can
disguise its taste.
If you reel in your own dinner, the rule is simple: Cook it
(or freeze it) the day you catch it—or the next day
at the latest. But if you're casting about for supper in a
supermarket, things get more complicated; you don't know
how long that fish has been out of water. How can you tell
if it's edible before you buy it?
There are several ways to judge whether fish is fresh (see
above). But the best way is to smell it. Fresh fish has
either no odor at all or a pleasant, briny scent. Fish with
a strong odor is too old to buy; it will taste the way it
smells, no matter how you cook it.
Fat or Lean?
a) FLESH should be firm and spring back
when poked.
b) EYES should be bright and clear.
c) SCALES should be an. chored to the
skin.
Basically, there are two kinds of fish and four ways to
cook them. The trick is to match the former with the
latter.
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