Cooking Monkfish
I just tried the monkfish recipe from my roasting cook book tonight. It was a very interesting couple of days..
Firstly, like usual, I photocopied my ‘menu’ and asked Carol to get all the stuff. Well, Mel did the shopping for us this week, not Carol. Carol’s used to me saying ‘if you can’t find something, find something close.’ Mel’s not. Mel gets to the supermarket and says ‘do you have monkfish?’ I guess the guy looked at her like she had three heads, and said that they could get it, but they had to get it from the fish market and it’d be in the next day. If it were me or Carol, I’d probably just have picked cod or something, but Mel went ahead and placed the order.
Because that was so odd, we decided to look up what a ‘monkfish’ was. Turns out it’s not really a fish, but kind of a grouping of fish, mostly off the Atlantic, and it’s a very deep fish, well past 600 to several thousand feet deep. It’s also called head fish because it’s about 80% head and teeth. Fascinating.. Here’s a good link.
http://gherkinstomatoes.com/2008/08/16/monkfish-a-scary-looking-delicacy/
http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries/recreational/articles/monkfish.html
The fillets themselves were really different. On one side, they were about 2/3rds as thick and round as a package of jimmey dean sausage, and on the tail side they resembled more of a normal fish fillet shape. And the meat seemed really tough too. I thought it’d be like chewing rubber.
The recipe was basically take the fillets, coat them in flour, sear them shut as hot as possible, and then roast them at 425 for somewhere around a half an hour.
What came out of the oven definitely looked like what I put in, but ahh man was it amazing. You’d think a fish that was that unusual and so deep would have some sort of strong flavor like shark does, but it was the most smooth fish you can find, almost light and fluffy, and not fishy at all. It was an amazing dish.
The recipe had a slightly vinigar based roasted red pepper / spicy sauce that I made too, that was kind of fun, but the big hits of tonight were learning how to seal fish before roasting, and the taste of monkfish. I’m hooked.
I just wonder how they caught it.
Oh, and I so bombed my couscous side tonight. Pineapple/basil couscous, it tasted great, but it pretty much turned to cement for some reason. Straight to the trash.
