Food, Home & Lifestyle
Pescado a la Talla | Red and Green Roasted Fish With Refried Beans
Lesson time 17:04 min
A favorite at Contramar, pescado a la talla is a whole, butterflied fish with an Italian-driven green sauce on one side and a spicier Mexican red sauce on the other. Learn how to re-create this dish, select fresh fish, and make refried beans.
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Topics include: Parsley and Garlic Sauce · Prepping the Fish · Refried Beans · Serving the Fish
Teaches Mexican Cooking
Celebrated chef Gabriela Cámara shares her approach to making Mexican food that brings people together: simple ingredients, exceptional care.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - Pescado a la talla is our most popular dish at Contramar for sure. It was the first dish on the menu. And it is a dish that comes directly from the Pacific Ocean from a place called Troncones very close to Zihuatanejo. In the state of Guerrero, we serve catch of the day with a rub of red chili sauce, which is a sauce that we made already. It's an adobo, literally. And you use it for pescado a la talla. It's the only sauce that you use for pescado a la talla traditionally. Different dried chilies, a little bit of tomato, garlic, onion. And on the other side, we have a green parsley garlic sauce. I love this dish especially because it's sort of my ancestry put together. One side has the red Mexican spicy sauce and the other side has the green more mild and more Mediterranean or Italian side. It's also a very good alternative for somebody to eat fish in a very Mexican way but without the spiciness and the chili component. So now I'm going to teach you how to make the salsa verde. And the salsa verde is, as I said, basically parsley. And this is clean, dry parsley. A little bit of the stems, not too many. And we are going to put olive oil so that we can mix it. We are going to use an immersion blender this time. We're going to put onion and garlic. I'm going to use a little bit of black pepper, just a tiny bit, and cumin. The center of Mexico, we don't use that much cumin. However, the pescado a la talla, the rub does have cumin. And we integrated this to give it sort of an earthy flavor that brings it all together. I really think that when we haven't used cumin, you can really feel the absence even if it's not that present. You can't really distinguish it if you don't have a very refined palate, but it really makes a difference to put it so I recommend you don't pass that one. And we're going to put salt. I'm using coarse salt. And you always want your sauces to be a little bit salted because you want them to have a flavor in themselves. And I'm going to start with the immersion blender. The end result will be a smooth green sauce pretty much the consistency of the red one that we already have. So we've finally blended all this parsley. And we're going to transfer it to our bowl here. And parsley is very fibery, so you will find-- it's sort of a fibery sauce. You need to know that so that you don't feel you haven't blended enough. OK. So here we have our green sauce next to our red sauce, which is the other that we used for the tacos al pastor. We don't have to make it again because it's the same sauce. Usually, this fish is cooked over fire on a grill. At Contramar, we make it that way. And I'm going to show you a home version of this. We're going to put a little bit of oil on this tray just because I don't want it to stick. This is a beautiful cabrilla that you can recognize because of these dots. So I'm going to open it up. This is already butterflied, which means cut so that you have ...
About the Instructor
A “star of modern Mexican cuisine,” Gabriela Cámara brings her local, sustainable twist to time-honored traditions. Now the chef of Contramar shares the richness of her culture through the art of food. Learn step-by-step recipes—for dishes of her own design, like tuna tostadas, and staples like tacos al pastor, salsa, and tortillas—and delight loved ones with your own delicious renditions of Mexican favorites.
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Gabriela Cámara
Celebrated chef Gabriela Cámara shares her approach to making Mexican food that brings people together: simple ingredients, exceptional care.
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