Miles Collins

Quick and Easy Seafood Cookery

Here’s a method for cooking fish fillets to perfection. This applies to any fish which you fancy cooking with the skin on, I like to leave the skin on most white fish because I want the customer to be able to recognise what they are eating and this is just a great way of cooking fish fillets.

Sea Bass is widely farmed now and avaliable year round, wild bass is, of course stunning and much nicer but this isn’t a post for professional chefs with someone else’s money to spend.

Have your local fishmonger (that means supermarket in the real world-are you listening Jamie, Rick and Gordon?) fillet the bass for you, if they’re any good they will pin bone any fillets you want-ask them to pin bone some trout for you, they’ll love that

Take your fillets home and put them on a blue colour coded chopping board like I have to so as to avoid cross contamination (are you still listening celebrities?) Take a sharp knife, not that one you got off the shopping channel on satellite that cuts through iron girders and never loses its edge, the other one with the flat blade.

Start at one end and pushing the knife away from you scrape the skin. Wipe your knife clean (if you’re under 21 ask a parent or guardian) and repeat. You want to remove any scales and excess moisture from the skin, don’t hack it to death, you want to leave the skin in place. When you have removed as much gunk from the skin as you can pat the fillets dry with kitchen towel.

Heat a frying pan, close the doors and turn on the extraction. Add a drop of oil and swirl around the pan. Carefully place the fillets skin side down in the pan and leave well alone. Resist the temptation to shake the pan or move the fillets around. The fish should cook on its skin side for about 80% of the total cooking time. As the skin begins to crisp and brown carefully turn over and finish cooking the fish on the flesh side, keep the temperature constant and the fish will cook very quickly. If you are cooking a thicker piece of fish then finish the cooking in a red hot oven.

When the flesh has turned a pearly white and the skin a crisp brown then you’re done.

Here’s one I did earlier with some bubble and squeek and a few trompette mushrooms, give it a go, you’ll never look back!