Leiths Cookery Week – day four

This is a round up of Thursday 11th July on the white intermediate course at Leiths School of Food and Wine. Thursday was focused on fish preparation and cooking, which is something I didn’t know a huge amount. We also made a meringue cake – the only non fish themed thing of the day!

We kicked off in the demo kitchen, starting with learning how to fillet both flat and round fish. Turns out flat fish are much easier to fillet as you can really get the knife in there – with round fish you can’t lay them flat in the same way so they’re a bit more challenging. With flat fish (such as lemon sole) you get four fillets – two bigger and two smaller – and with round fish (such as sea bass or mackerel) you get two longer fillets. You really do need a fish filleting knife to be able to do it as it’s impossible without the flexible blade.

We looked at a range of ways to cook fish – from smoking, to baking/roasting, to pan frying, to poaching. First up was hot smoked mackerel fillets with crushed new potatoes and chive oil. To make your own smoker you need a few layers of tin foil in the bottom of a roasting tin, which you put tea and dark brown sugar in, then you put your fish on a rack over the top and wrap the whole thing in foil. You then place it on the barbecue or hob until it starts smoking, leave it for 5 mins, then turn the heat off and leave it in the residual smoke for 10 mins. It’s very easy but it does fill your house with smokey smell – so I reckon it’s best done on the barbecue. The fish was deliciously smokey – a real treat.

Next up was a very healthy honey roasted whole sea bass. Fish only needs 30 mins or so to marinade otherwise you can start to cure it, in the style of ceviche. Roasted whole fish are best wrapped in a cocoon of tin roil rolled at the top like a giant pasty. It’s a great, healthy way to cook fish and it’s beautiful to serve to people at a dinner party. We also looked at pan friend brill – a relative to the turbot – which was served with deep fried vegetable ribbons (courgette, carrot, leeks etc). The veggies were a nice crisp accompaniment to the fish.

Finally we watched our chef do poached lemon sole with burnt hollandaise. The fillets were rolled up (skin on the inside) and then poached in fish stock for around 20 minutes. Once you’ve plated up and poured the hollandaise on top, you put the plate under the grill for a couple of mins so the hollandaise goes lightly golden. Deeeelish.

In the afternoon, we were each given a whole seabass. Following our lesson in filleting, we had to scale (messy!) and fillet the fish. It was the first time on the course that I felt squeamish! I declined to gut my fish but I did scale it – which is a very strange experience! The scales tend to fly all over the place so this is best done with the fish inside a large (ideally see through) plastic bag. You hold the fish by the tail and then using a knife at a 45 degree angle, you briskly strip away the scales. The fish will actually change colour, and when they’re all off the fish will be totally smooth. You can then give your fish a good wash under a cold tap and then fillet away. In brief – you make a cut behind the gills, a cut by the tail, then you slice down one side of the spine and gentle slice away the fillet, keeping close to the bones. That’s where the flexible knife comes in super handy – if you go in with a rigid knife, you will waste a LOT of fish.

We served the fish with curried lentils, rounded off with some cream and comcassed tomatoes. The lentils cook in fish stock (which smells deeply unpleasant!) but it takes one the most wonderful rich flavour, made more delicious by the tiny pinch of saffron. Yum.

Our other dish was a hazelnut meringue cake, served with a raspberry coulis. It was loads of fun to make – just like making meringue but with nibbed hazelnuts. As I said in Tuesday’s round up, if you’re grinding up some nuts to add to meringue, take a tablespoon of your measured out caster sugar and pop that in the blender with the hazelnuts – it will help act as an abrasive and it will help absorb some of the oil in the nuts. You don’t want to overgrind them so they go greasy – this will weigh down your meringue. You ideally need two identical circles of meringue for this one, so it’s a good idea to flip your baking parchment and trace out two circles using an upside down bowl. Don’t forget to put it back on the tray pen side down otherwise you will get dodgy marks on your meringue!

The meringue cake is a very simple dessert but it’s very fragile so I don’t think it would travel very well. It’s cooked on a higher heat than a pavlova or meringue so it takes on a bit more colour and is wonderfully chewy and mallowy in the middle! I will definitely be making it again.

Five things I learned today:

• Seabass fins are SHARP – be careful!
  
• Fish should smell of the sea – when it’s fresh it doesn’t smelly overly fishy. The eyes should be bright and the gills shouldn’t be discoloured. It pays to become friendly with your fish monger! Fish is best eaten on the day you buy it.
• After gutting a round fish, open the cavity and remove the blood line – it’s a dark red line running up the middle of the fish. If a fish is cooked with the blood line in it, it will be bitter.
• When handling a raw fish, use a little bit of salt on your fingers to help you get purchase on it.
• If cooking a whole fish, the eyes should be opaque when you take it out. That helps indicate that it’s cooked.

Disclosure: I contacted Leiths about their courses and arranged for a discount on their intermediate course in exchange for an honest review of my experience, which I have chronicled over a series of posts.