stuffed fish
(omnivore)

recipe by m-c

just the recipe

what I was looking for

something great to do with fish -- I'd like to eat fish 2-3 times a week, so the more great recipes the better

what I made

I found a great recipe for fish stuffed with cilantro and scallions in Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Beyond the Great Wall (pp. 222-224). The method involved tying together pairs of chopsticks -- way too elaborate to appeal to me. The first time I made it I cut a pocket in a slab of salmon, but even that seemed unnecessary when I tasted the result. So the second time I made it I just laid down a bed of stuffing and put the slab of salmon on top.

The first time I made the fish, I made the stuffing as given in A+D's recipe, with cilantro and scallions and lard. Delicious, but I wanted even more porky flavor to play off the fish, so the second time I included pork meat with the fat.

chit-chat

I'm drawn to dishes that play fish and meat off one another -- steak morvandiau (beefsteak adorned with anchovies and black olives), vitello tonnato (cold veal in tunafish sauce), trout wrapped in bacon. So when I tasted the pork fat in the first version of this dish I made, it's no wonder that I wanted to rope in even more porkiness in the second.

A sensible person might well object to calling the delicious goop under the fish a "stuffing." I remember long ago ordering "stuffed shrimp" in a restaurant and being disappointed that the shrimp lay on top of the stuffing rather than having it somehow jammed inside their little curved bodies. If you feel disappointed with the name of this recipe, by all means cut a pocket in the fish and put some stuffing inside it; or you could call the dish, perhaps less appealingly but more accurately, "fish with stuff."

grades for my version

healthy	B	Fish, leaves, scallions, offset to some extent by some pork and pork fat.
fast	A	Fish-fast.
easy	A	My version is easy.
cheap	C	Salmon isn't cheap.
delicious	A	Excellent.

yield

Serves two.

equipment

   a dishtowel
   a needlenose pliers
   a food processor
   a baking sheet
   a toaster oven

the fish

ingredients	A+D scaled	m-c	why?
fish	2 whole white perch	10 oz. salmon fillet cut from the fat end	easier [1]
salt	---	to taste	tastier [2]
Notes
[1]	It's hard to find whole small fish in regular supermarkets.
[2]	I'm using half the total amount of salt here and the other half in the stuffing.

   Rinse and dry the fish. I skipped this step for decades, but after doing a side-by-side comparison of rinsed and unrinsed fish, I'll never skip it again. For drying, I use a cloth towel that then goes in the laundry immediately. If you can compost a fish-wiped paper towel, you might prefer that.

   With a needle-nose pliers in your dominant hand, use your helper hand to feel whether there are any pinbones and if so pull them out with the pliers. A hunk of fillet usually has a fatter half and a thinner half; the pinbones usually hang out in the thinner half.

Now salt the flesh side of the fillet very lightly and let it sit on the open counter while you make the stuffing. I started doing this salting step after reading about it in Fabio Trabocchi's Cucina of Le Marche (Ecco, 2006), and, as with the rinsing, I'll never skip it again. Being a restaurant chef, Trabocchi salts the fish and refrigerates it for an hour. Good; that's what we want a restaurant chef to do for our health and safety. But in a home kitchen we can achieve the same result by salting the fish and leaving it out on the counter for a much shorter time.

the stuffing

I scaled the fish but not the stuffing. A virtue of leaving the stuffing outside the thing to be "stuffed" is that you can make as much stuffing as you like. This works with the Thanksgiving turkey, too.

ingredients	A+D	m-c	why?
cilantro	¼ cup leaves	¼ cup leaves and stems	cheaper, tastier [1]
scallions	1 cup chopped fine	1 cup chopped	easier [2]
red pepper flakes	1 teaspoon	1 teaspoon	no change
pork	2 Tablespoons lard	3 Tablespoons fat and lean pork	tastier [3]
salt	1 teaspoon	to taste	tastier [4]
Notes
[1]	In a recipe like this, where the cilantro is being ground up, there's no reason not to use the tasty stems, and my thrifty habits make me shudder at the thought of throwing them away.
[2]	You need to cut the scallions into short pieces so they won't turn into long green snakes in the food processor, but there's no need to cut them fine.
[3]	I aimed for pieces that were roughly 50-50 fat and lean, cut from around the fat edge of the pork chop. No need to be exact.
[4]	I used the other half of the salt here, in the stuffing.

   Put all the ingredients for the stuffing into your food processor and process them to a rough mixture, with individual pieces of scallion and pork still distinguishable. You don't want a puree.

putting it all together

   Grease a baking sheet -- now here's a way in which I'm not frugal -- I always use foil on my baking sheet first and then grease it.

Pile the stuffing onto the greased sheet in a shape approximately the same as the shape of the piece of fish.

Now put the fish on top of the pile of stuffing, skin-side up.

   Broil the fish under the broiler in your toaster oven till both the fish and the stuffing are cooked through, roughly 10 minutes. The fad of serving "medium-rare" fish doesn't suit a recipe like this. Test the fish and a little bit of stuffing peeking out from under by tapping them with your index finger; they shouldn't feel soft. When they both feel firm, taste the stuffing.

I love cooking salmon skin-side up under the broiler. The skin gets deliciously crispy and savory, whereas in a frying pan it's hard to crisp it up without overcooking the fish.

go-withs

Roasted eggplant wedges and roasted sweet-potato wedges.

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