Home & Lifestyle, Food
Recipe: Roasted Branzino
Lesson time 17:54 min
Don’t be intimidated by buying and preparing fish. Wolfgang teaches you how to identify the freshest fish, and he shares his technique for perfectly seasoning and preparing his herb crusted branzino.
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Topics include: How to Select Fish • Herb Crust • Beurre Blanc Sauce
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In 16 lessons, learn exclusive recipes and cooking techniques from the chef behind Spago and CUT.
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A lot of people have problems to cook fish, how to handle fish, and how to buy fish. Yet, it can be so simple. You know, you have to find the right market but they really have fresh fish, where they don't cheat you, where you go home and it smells of iodine or something like that or old. Fish has to be really fresh. Then it's really delicious. Now how we handle fish. If you're playing fish home, whole loin fillets, let me show you what we do. I don't just put it in say, with ice. I have here some bags of ice-- see that-- and I cover on my fish with it. And I put a towel on top. See that? So here we have two kinds of fish. One is a farm raised loup de mer or branzino, which comes from the Mediterranean. And this is a black bass from the Atlantic. Both are weirdly delicious. If you look at the fish that is fresh, it has to have nice and clear eyes. Look at that here, see that? And you can look in the gills. Here, we took them out. It has to be nice and red. So it is really important when you get fish that it's really fresh. So when the eyes are sunken in and everything, then you know the fish is not fresh. But for sure, keep the fish on ice in the coldest place in your refrigerator. What I do when I go to a market and my fish-- I always look at the whole fish and I tell the fishmonger, you fillet this one for me. Because at home, I have children, they don't like fish with bones in it. And I'm scared to give them fish with bones. So what do I do? I have to make beautiful fillets, just like that. See that? These are branzino fillets. Then how to cook them right. They cook really fast. So I am going to make an herb crust with it and I'm going to have a tiny little butter sauce-- a quick sauce with capers, lemon, a little shallots. And at the farmer's market, I saw these tiny little tomatoes here. These this tomato berries here. So I'm going to add that to it, plus a lot of fresh herbs. When I cook, I love a lot of fresh herbs, I love a lot of spices. It makes the food sing. It makes the food really so vibrant. All right. So the fish is filleted already. Now the next thing is we're going to make our herb crust. What is the crust? I have bread crumbs here and a food processor. So I'm going to put them right in here. OK. This method of cooking fish, you can do it at home, even if you cook it for 10 people. It's so simple and so easy. So now I'm going to add herbs to it. Here, we have parsley leaves. OK. So you decide what you like. Parsley, tarragon, rosemary, thyme. They are all wonderful. Now if you have a little sprig of rosemary, don't put the whole sprig on it. Take it just like that and take it off the stem. So we're not going to add too much of the Rosemary because Rosemary is probably one of the strongest herbs you can get. ...
About the Instructor
Legend has it Wolfgang Puck came up with his famous smoked salmon pizza when his restaurant ran out of bagels—and ended up changing the way America cooks. In his MasterClass, the five-time James Beard Award-winning chef behind more than 100 restaurants brings you into his kitchen. You’ll learn not only how to master starters, mains, sides, and cocktails, but also how to take risks to create memorable recipes of your own.
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Wolfgang Puck
In 16 lessons, learn exclusive recipes and cooking techniques from the chef behind Spago and CUT.
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