Hi, I am Barton Seaver, and today we are going to be cooking with Spanish Mackerel, it’s one of my favorite fish.
The Blue Ocean Institutes's some good friends of mine, lists this is as one of their greenlist species, very sustainable, well get into that a little bit, but in the process of doing this dish, one of my favorites, it's a Seared Mackerel fillet with toasted Almond Potatoes and a Lemon-Garlic Gremolata. Its a very versatile dish, and go with almost any of the fish that you can imagine, but in the course of showing all this, well show you the different techniques we are going to use, starting off with how to fillet the fish, and then one of my favorite techniques of brining, then well show you how to cook the potatoes, and then into the sauce itself.
Then well put it all together for you. For this dish, well go over the ingredients we had. I had a about a pound-and-a-half of Mackerel fillet used about 3 tablespoons of salt. I like kosher salt better than any other. It gives you a better feel for how much you are using. A pound of Red Skinned Potatoes, I used about a half a cup of Olive oil in order to toast the Almonds. I have got about a half a cup of slivered or sliced blanched almonds, skin removed is very important.
I have got one Lemon sliced very thin, one clove of Garlic, we are going to use only about a half of it, so small clove is fine. About two tablespoons of chopped parsley and then some of my favorite cooking tools that we have been using for this recipe, I have got a great little six inch chefs knife. It’s an all- purpose knife, that I really like using. You can chop parsley with it, slice your Lemons very thin and even fillet the fish. I think a small knife is particularly important, because it gives you much more control over what you are doing, and larger the knife, the more chance you have to cut yourself. Its also very important that the knife be very sharp, with the dull knife, you are much more likely to cut yourself with the dull knife than a sharp knife in fact.
And then one of my favorite tools that we have is a microplane that’s the brand name, there re a couple of other versions out there, but its a very fine grater, its great for Garlic, Lemons zest, orange zest, anything you want to get a really nice fresh burst of flavor for you and cinnamon and some dry herbs are great on it too. Then for the actual cooking process were going to need 2 sauté pans. I tend to like to use eight to 12 inch sauté pans. You don’t want to get too much heat you don’t want to make this unmanageable for you. I have been a professional chef for 12 years now.
I have been cooking all over the world. I started my career as chef, because food is always been a huge and integral part of my family upbringing. Family dinner around the table is an absolute necessity, but fortunately, food was great, and all my friends wanted to be there with us for it, and had some interesting experience. Worked as a fisherman in Africa, as a chef in Spain, and all over the United States, and most recently back in my hometown in Washington, D.C. So with that being said, let's start cooking.