I located some steel head trout fillets yesterday along with some head-and-all Rainbow trout. Here's what I did with the steel head trout last evening. I didn't have wine or chicken stock on hand, so I used beer -- a lager -- as a substitute. Set the oven for 400 degrees (F). Boil a couple potatos for 10 minutes and set aside. Sautee onions, a shredded carrot, & celery in a pan. Once that starts turning golden brown, add a couple sprigs of fresh thyme and four cloves of crushed and chopped garlic. Add your lager (or white wine and chicken stock), and salt and pepper your fish while the vegetable/herb/beer mixture comes to a boil. Add the fish and potatos, and get the entire pan in the oven. Leave it for 30 minutes, basting the fish about 3 times. Once you take it out, crank the oven to broil. Remove the fish and potatos to a seperate cooking sheet, and put them back in the oven (that's now on broil). Golden-brown up the fish (about 5 minutes), and return to a serving platter. Ladel the vegetable mixture over the fish and potatos. Garnish with chopped parsley, and squeeze a lemon over the whole thing. Then crack an icy cold beer.
Note: there's four fillets in there, so we're in good shape. I'll gladly get another if Pepe comes back.
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4 comments:
Nice. I like fresh water fish but don't eat much of it. Up in the alps they have trout in the icy rushing streams that are quit tasty. They usually just do 'em in butter.
That sounds great. I have a hard time thinking of a time where butter isn't a good idea.
The original recipe called for red snapper, but I opted for something a bit more regional, and on sale ($6.99/lb). The stuff I bought was likely farm-raised. Like you say about the alps, there's a noticable difference between salmon and trout that's farm-raised vs. fresh icy-cold water mountain stream salmon and trout. Stream fish is supposed to have lower mercury levels than the farm-raised stuff, too (important note for expecting women).
You sure? I heard that acid rain leaches heavy metals out of stone and soil in river beds. Of ocurse, in Courmayeur, the water is mostly glacial melt from before acid rain and the water spends very little time in the river before being miles downstream.
I can only go off what the biologists who studied this stuff have argued. But it seems the farm-raised fish have stronger levels because they are in such close contact with other fish. The toxins build up. The fresh water variety apparently get much more of the necessary cold water running through their systems to flush the toxins away (or so goes the argument).
The Atlantic Monthly had an article not long ago about fresh water Alaskan salmon. It dealt a bit with the mercury content. And then about two months ago I listened to a couple biologists who did DNA sampling of fish purported to be red snapper. When the DNA came back, it wasn't the same code as found in all snapper -- turned out to be some kind of white meat ocean fish.
The structure of our 21st century food system has come a long way. I get a kick out of Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma." Pollan said one of the most gratifying meals was what he called his Hunter-Gatherer meal. He harvested everything from wild mushrooms, roots, to killing a deer, taking all of it out of the natural world, cleaning and preparing it, and -- obviously -- eating it. Getting back to the fundamentals anyhow.
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