Wednesday: Sablefish

I had a fish craving yesterday, so I went to the fish market at lunchtime. Next to the stuff they always have (halibut, snapper, salmon, ling cod), there were a few sablefish fillets. I haven't cooked sablefish before, and I'm not sure that I've eaten it, but there was a voice in the back of my head telling me that I wanted to buy those fillets. Sometimes I ignore that voice, but those fillets weren't just intriguing - they looked really good.

So I get home with my sablefish and google for a bit to find out what the internet thinks I should do with it and I find out that sablefish is also called black cod. That starts to pull up associations from the back brain: black cod... Nobu... miso! (Apropos nothing: "black cod, nobu, miso, plum!" may be my new mantra for the next couple days.)

Sure enough, pretty much every recipe I can find for sablefish/black cod calls for miso. There's a recipe in BittmanWorld for black cod marinated in miso and mirin and then broiled that looks as comparable to all the others I found (except for the Nobu recipe at epicurious: that one calls for 2 to 3 days of marinating and I wasn't going to wait that long). I followed the recipe pretty much exactly (45 minutes of salting, 2 hours marinating time) except for quantity. I'll gush more later, but this dish is absolutely amazing.

As a starter we had cucumber soup with nori and tofu (also from BittmanWorld), using fresh tofu from the local Asian market. I hadn't tried the fresh tofu before either - it's really nice stuff. This soup would have been better with dashi, but I wasn't going to do that much work last night, so I just used chicken stock. It was still very good.

To go along with the fish I made sweet rice and a quick pickle with yellow turnips from the farmers market, rice vinegar, and mirin.

So, the fish. It was good. It was good enough to inspire me to write way more than I usually do. :-) The texture of the fish was almost like good scallops (the flakes of fish, not the whole fillets) and the combination of flavors (rich fish, sweet-salty-umami from the marinade/glaze) was magic. The one thing I'll change next time I do this recipe (and I will do it again) is that I'll garnish with pickled ginger. Bittman suggests grated fresh ginger that's been soaked in water and that was just too harsh for me. The turnip pickles went really well, but a bit of ginger would have been nice as well.