Sea Bass with Miso Sauce

Sea Bass with Miso Sauce

Eating Nobu’s black cod inspired this recipe. I found it quite hard to get the ‘blackened effect’ – at first I tried grilling the fish, but that tends to dry it out, so instead of grilling it I first bake and then pan-fry the fish briefly in very hot clarified butter.

Ingredients (serves 4)

4 sea bass fillets

1 tablespoon clarified butter

Marinade for fillets:

4 tablespoons mirin

4 tablespoons soya sauce

Juice of 1 lemon (40mls)

Salt

1 or 2 finely chopped green chillies – optional

Finely chopped fresh ginger – optional

Finely chopped spring onion - optional

Few stalks fresh parsley - optional 
¼ teaspoon chilli powder - optional

Method

1. Pre heat the oven to 180°C

2. Marinate the fish in the marinade for at least 10 minutes.

3. Bake the fish with the marinade in a covered dish (with foil or a lid), for about 7 minutes.

4. Heat the clarified butter in a large frying pan until it is very hot but not smoking.

5. Drain the fillets from the marinade and then fry them for about 30 seconds on each side.

6. Serve immediately with a sprinkling of chilli powder and then a tablespoon of warm sweet miso sauce on top of each fillet.

Sweet miso sauce

Ingredients

25 mls sake

25 mls mirin

4 tablespoons (125g) white miso paste

4 tablespoons  (50g) sugar

Method for sweet miso sauce

1. Put the miso paste in a saucepan and add the sugar.

2. Gradually add the sake and mirin, stirring well to prevent lumps from forming.

3. Heat the mixture over a medium heat until the sugar has dissolved (about 5 minutes), stirring constantly all the while.

4. Take the pan off the heat and let the mixture cool down – it keeps well in the fridge for a few weeks.

Additional Information

The cooking time is crucial in this recipe – if you over bake or over fry the fish it loses the ‘melt in your mouth softness’ that makes this recipe so good. The cooking time in this recipe is based on fairly thin fillets -you could also use salmon or cod instead, but depending on the thickness of the fish, you would need to adjust the cooking time accordingly.

The chillies, ginger, spring onion and parsley do add a little bit of flavour to the fish – I have tried making it without these and it still tastes good, but the lemon juice, soya sauce and mirin are essential ingredients of the marinade.



Health Benefits of fish with soya sauce
An article in a newspaper on 18/11/09 tells about how adding soy sauce to baked fish enhances its omega-3 health benefits. According to the article, baked or boiled fish is a better source than fried fish of omega-3 fatty acids (which have been shown to protect the heart), and adding low salt soy sauce to a fishy meal enhances the benefits further. The researchers studied omega-3 consumption among nearly 200,000 people, as well as the different ways the fish was prepared; their findings were presented to the American Heart Association.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6590817/Fish-with-soy-sauce-is-good-for-the-heart.html