Striped Bass - Broccoli

Barton Seaver: Hi, I am Barton Seaver and today we are cooking wild-striped bass with a Spanish inspired Catalan dish of Catalan Broccoli and right now we have got our pine nut sauce going, that's going to go underneath the whole plate. Right now we are going to show you how to start cooking the broccoli. I have got a smaller saut pan here on pretty high heat. I am going to take some butter. Now I like using butter for this because it just adds a little bit of richness to the dish and a little bit of a contrast to the olive oil sauce. So I am adding this to a hot pan, not too hot because you don't want the butter to brown immediately before it all melts, but you want it to foam up like that and get nice and brown as it fully melts and smell of that you will know it takes on that really nutty aroma and appeal to it. Now what we are going to start off with is a little bit of broccoli that I have blanched, just heads of broccoli that I have thrown into generously salted boiling water for about 45 seconds to a minute. You don't really want to cook it until it is soggy or anything. We are going to do a fair amount of cooking on the product again here. So you want to have a saut pan that's large enough to hold it, because what we are trying to do is really brown the broccoli. So it gets a nice caramelized sort of charred crunchy bits to it and you want to make sure that the broccoli is fairly dry, because as you put it in any water in there is going to splatter up quite a bit as you can see it is doing. So be careful in this segment just a little bit. So we are going to throw that in there. Now we are just going to let that sit for a little while. So you want it to really take on the flavor of the butter, take on the flavor of that real hard saut and it takes a little while, be patient with it. As you notice I haven't moved the broccoli yet and I am not going to. You don't need to. As soon as you put something on a saut pan, everyone's first instinct is to start rattling around with it. Just let it sit. The point of sauting is that it is in contact with the pan. So let it stay there. Now, to finish this dish what I have done is just taken little bit of onion that I have sliced super thin here and you can just go ahead and start layering that over. You don't need a whole lot, but you can use as much as you want to. I tend to like onion a lot. So I will throw in there a little bit more. So it is right on the top and as we begin to toss this all and the onions will get nice and soft and really melt into the dish here and then I have got a little bit of chili flake, I like things a little bit spicy. So what you want to do with this as well is add it in towards the beginning because I like the butter to be infused with the slight spice of the chili so that it really ends up throughout the whole dish, not just little spicy bites. And then we are going to finish it off with currants and pine nuts and what this is going to do is -- the reason why you want to wait to layer on those, these have a lot of sugar in them and so they will burnt very quickly. You have got enough sugar in the onions and everything in the butter, to let it just go for now and we will finish it with the pine nuts because you don't want those to over toast as well. So while we have this cooking and we have our pine nut sauce rolling in the back here, which is almost done, what I will do in the next segment show you how to finish off the pine nut sauce while we start up cooking up the bass.