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How to Cook Mackerel with Toasted Almond Potatoes

How to Cook Mackerel with Toasted Almond Potatoes

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Barton Seaver

He is 28, but his culinary resume reads like a seasoned 40-something. Washington, D.C. native Executive Chef Barton Seaver, a StarChefs.com Rising Star of 2006 and recently nominated as a Rising Star Chef by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, of Hook was taught at an early age about the importance of food.

Dinner in the Seaver home was a seven nights a week family affair. Eating dinner with his family was a communal celebration and involved shopping for the freshest ingredients at local markets, instilling this value in him at a young age. Mac and Cheese was never just out of the box, but prepared with a homemade bamel cheese sauce and pasta made from scratch. Summers spent at a family friends hog farm on the Chesapeake Bay, along with crabbing and going with his father to buy fresh seafood from local fisherman, taught Seaver the importance of supporting local purveyors and using quality and fresh ingredients.

According to Seaver, "Seasonality and locality made sense to me early on." Seaver began his professional career working for popular D.C. restaurants such as Ardeo, Felix, and Greenwood. After years of invaluable kitchen experience, Seaver made his way to Hyde Park, New York, where he trained at the renowned Culinary Institute of America. During his schooling, he spent time in the kitchens of Tru restaurant and The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton under Sarah Stegner in Chicago.

Upon graduating with honors, he immediately took a fellowship position at C.I.A. as a graduate teacher in both the meat and fish classes. Working in this hands-on environment taught Seaver the importance of proper handling and techniques of exceptionally fresh products, all the while giving him direct access to sources of fish through the eastern seaboard ports. Under the guidance of Chef Corky Clark, he learned to appreciate underutilized species of fish and became a proponent of sustainable ocean products.

Seaver is a certified sommelier through the Sommelier Society of America and is continuing his studies with Wine and Spirits Educational Trust in London. Recently, he was asked to join the Board of Directors of DC Central Kitchen as the culinary force behind the non-profits educational programs. Additionally, he is also active in the Slow Food movement, and recently cooked at the bi-annual Slow Food Terra Madre conference in October 2006 in Italy. Other organization involvements include the Chefs Collaborative, the James Beard Foundation, the National Restaurant Association, the International Seafood Conference, Chefs Congress, a culinary resource to the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Seafood Alliance. As a firm believer in the idea that chefs are the keepers of food culture, he is publishing a monthly article for the online newsletter for StarChefs.com.

In an effort to educate fellow industry members, Chef Seaver will address the issue of sustainability from the perspective of a chef offering solutions to common problems they face in their profession such as buying decisions and their responsibility as the definers of what is fashionable eating. Monthly columns are archived on the StarChefs.com website with new articles posting on the 15th of each month.

How to Cook Mackerel with Toasted Almond Potatoes

This video series will show how to cook mackerel with toasted almond potatoes.

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Mackerel

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Mackaral

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Fish

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Blue ocean

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Barton

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Potatoes

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Clean

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Fillet

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Filet

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Gremolata

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How to Cook Mackerel with Toasted Almond Potatoes

Ingredients

2 lbs. mackerel filet

¼ cup of salt

1 tbsp. sugar

2 cups water

1 1b. red skinned organic potatoes

1 tsp. natural almond extract OR 1 cup almond milk

¼ cup almond oil

¼ cup sliced, blanched almonds

I lemon, sliced very thin

1 clove garlic

2 tbsp. chopped parsley

1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

Instructions

1. Clean and cut the mackerel into fillets. To cut the mackerel, make one small incision right behind the fin. Insert the knife and push it straight down to fillet. Come straight out down through the back and end up with a nice fillet. Fillet up the other side as well using the same technique, just cut and make one small incision right below the head. Insert the knife and press straight down.

 

2. Trim the fins off and the belly. There are 10 bones and they run straight down the middle of the fillet. Use a V-Cut technique and make a small incision right down through the skin but not all the way through on either side of the bones and remove all of the bones. Cut about a half inch or so and once you get under them, just cut right under and then pull all the bones out.


3. To brine the mackerel, create a mixture using 3-4 cups of cold water, 2 tablespoons of salt and 1 tablespoon of sugar. Add the mackerel fillets to the mixture and let them sit for 5-7 minutes. Once they are done, pull them out and pat them dry with a paper towel.


4. To make almond potatoes, cut the red skinned potatoes in half and boil them in generously salted water. Simmer almonds in olive oil on low heat until they are golden brown. When the potatoes have finished cooking, place them in the almond oil on high and let them crisp up. Add a bit of parsley and some more almonds at the end.


5. To make the gremolata, slice a lemon into thin slices and sear it on both sides in a pan. Chop the lemon finely and put it in a bowl. Crush fresh garlic into a fine powder and add it to the lemons along with a bit of salt and olive oil.


6. Season the mackerel with a little salt and place it in a saute pan on high heat. Add a little almond oil and a little cooking oil to the pan. Cook the fillets for 3 minutes on each side.


7. Plate the mackerel and potatoes, add the gremolata and serve.

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Transcripts

Barton Seaver: Hi, I am Barton Seaver, and today we are going to be cooking with Spanish Mackerel. Its 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. Its 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, thats 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 saut pans. I tend to like to use 8-12 inch saut pans. You dont want to get too much heat, you dont 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 DC. So with that being said, let's start cooking.

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