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How to Cook Mackerel with Toasted Almond Potatoes

Mackerel - Cleaning the Fish

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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.

Mackerel - Cleaning the Fish

This video will show how to cook mackerel, specifically how to clean the fish.

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Mackerel - Cleaning the Fish

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. Today we are going to be cooking Spanish Mackerels. This is one of my favorite dish is this Seared Spanish Mackerel Fillet with toasted Almond Potatoes and a Lemon-Garlic Gremolata and in this segment what we are going to be showing you is a little bit about the fish and how to fillet it.

So, this is Spanish Mackerel here. My good friends at the Blue Ocean Institute have listed this as one of their green species. It is a very sustainable catch right now. It is caught with surface gear down in -- largely in the southern Atlantic waters down in Florida especially, where most of the stuff in America is coming from. It is an absolutely beautiful, beautiful fish. It has got this wonderful yellow spots to it and this brilliant silvery gray skin to it. Its a long, sleek. slender fish, really, really pretty, very easy to fillet as well. Often you find this in the whole format. So what we are going to do is just make one small incision right behind the fin right here and once we have cut that from the head, taking a small knife which is what I prefer to use so that you have a full control over the blade at all times. When you have really big knives sometimes you dont know where the tip is and gets hurt. All you do is insert the knife and push it straight down to fillet. So what you are doing is just creating a nice fillet as you go, separating this flesh from the backbone. Come straight out down through the back, we end up with nice fillet. The Mackerel contends to sort of pull apart a little bit, thats not really a big deal. There is a little bit actually it's going to tend to caramelize and crunch out a little bit as you cook it and the skin you always cut Mackerel with the skin on. Hold it together and the skin crisps up nicely.

So, we will go ahead and 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. Now you see I am putting a little bit of pressure on the fish just to keep it in place, so that when you are pushing the whole thing doesnt push out with you. Now all these fins and everything that we have come up with, we can trim those off, no problem and the bones just go into the trash there and then you are left with these nice Mackerel fillets, as I said with the fins, very easy just to trim those off and then any of the belly that is left on there as well, you just trim off.

Now, Mackerel's bones are very easy to deal with. There are just about 10 bones and they run straight down the middle of the fillet and what we use is called a V-Cut technique and you just make a small incision right down through the skin but not all the way through on either side of the bones and just to make sure you get them all out, you cut about a half inch or so and once you get under them, just cut right under and then pull all the bones right out. There they all are. So now you are left with the completely boneless Mackerel fillet. That beautiful skin is still intact on this side. Now, one of the reasons why I love Mackerel so much is, its a very sustainable catch. The Blue Ocean Institute really recommends using this fish because it matures very quickly, so therefore its very resilient to high fishing pressure. It is caught using gear that has no by-catch associated with it meaning undesirable species are not caught alongside of it, as well as the gear doesnt cause any habitat destruction. So all in all, this is a great fish to be using. There is one concern about elevated mercury levels. So check with EPA website or the Blue Ocean to find out how that affects you. So what we are going to be doing now is cutting these up into serving sizes and then we will move on.

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