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How to Cook Mackerel with Toasted Almond Potatoes

Mackerel - Brining 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 - Brining the Fish

This video shows how to cook mackerel, specifically brining the fish.

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Mackerel - Brining 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 cooking with Mackerels. This is one of my favorite dishes. Its a Pan-seared Mackerel Fillet with toasted Almond Potatoes and a Lemon-Garlic Gremolata. Now in this segment, what I am going to be showing you how to do is brining the fish. Brining fish, I think is one of the most important things that you can do as it adds so much moisture, so much flavor into almost anything. In fact the only fish that I dont brine is Tuna, just because it changes the color and the texture of the outside, but Mackerel bears very, very well with brining. Its very simple to do, only takes about ten minutes. So what I have here is approximately 3 or 4 cups of cold water. Now cold water is important because you dont want to warm the fish up and possibly cook it. I also have salt and sugar. I have about two tablespoons of salt and one table spoon of sugar, which is a good ratio. What we are trying to do is make a mixture that tastes a little bit like sea water.

Now what brining does to the fish is that it draws out some of the proteins as well as sort of injecting a little bit of moisture into it as well as seasoning the fillet all the way throughout. So you get a better flavor that taste more like it is, sort of highlights the freshness of the product as well as it gives you a little bit more leeway in the cooking of it. Its a little bit more forgiving before you end up with dried out fish. So as I said we have about four cups of water, about two tablespoons of salt, one table spoon of sugar. Now I tend to use kosher salt because it dissolves very easily as well as it has a real good texture to the finger. So you can actually physically tell how much salt you are adding into it. Once you get trained to using one salt, it becomes very difficult to use another kind. So kosher salt, a little bit of sugar, mix that in there. Now dont be afraid of salt. I think one of the greatest mistakes that most home cooks make is two-fold. One is that they use too much heat, slow down, cook things slowly and they dont use enough salt. Salt enhances natural flavors, makes things taste more like what they are. So I am just going to spend a few minutes here, just trying to get that salt and sugar dissolved in there and its not wholly important to get all of it dissolved because that will happen over the course but -- and then we will take our Mackerel fillets, we have boneless Mackerel fillet with the skin still on. I will just lay them in the water, its that simple. Now well just let them sit in there for -- Mackerel fillet about that thick, probably take about 5-7 minutes and once they are done, well pull them out and just pat them dry with a paper towel and set them, we are ready to start cooking.

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