Happy Friday everyone!
Welcome back to How I Cook+.
For the paid crew today, we’ve got a gorgeous smoked fish soba. A clean, healthy, light recipe that’s perfect for the first cook out of the year.
Right now, there are builders smashing the upstairs flat to pieces, they’ve been here for 5 weeks now. They start work at 7am and finish at 6pm (a good shift, fair play!!) and achieving peace is pretty challenging right now. I whipped this up in the evening sun once they’d wrapped up, pulled up a chair in the garden and proceeded to eat and slurp in perfect, delicious silence.
They’re mixing cement upstairs as I write this and it sounds insane, like they’ve emptied my old piggy bank, a handful of razors and a pint of milk into the machine.
When will it end? Lord, bring me peace.
Anyway, have a read, cook this soup and achieve some peace of your own.
B x
When life serves you a big fat plate of brick-smashing-builders-in-the-upstairs-flat-from-dawn-til-dusk and it gnaws away at your brain for 5 weeks straight (just another 5 weeks to go!!), there’s only one thing to do. Make soup!
I decided to scoop up some of the buttercup yellow smoked haddock from the shop, with a vision of a clear, dashi based broth, imbued with a mellow, subtle smoke with chewy noodles, fresh crunchy vegetables and perfectly poached, lean fish suspended within. Cor, that sounds peaceful.
This craving may also have something to do with the fact that I’ve just returned from a fairly gluttonous trip to Paris, the home of butter, foie gras and frites. No punches were pulled, steaks were peppered, demis were drunk, corks were popped, cigarettes were smoked and good times had. What goes up, must come down and it’s time to cleanse. Cue, smoked fish soba.
There’s a lot riding on this soup… How’d it go? Let’s take a look.
SMOKED HADDOCK
At the centre of today’s recipe is sits smoked haddock, the funny looking yellow fish you eyed suspiciously as a kid in the supermarket. Perhaps, like me, you can remember the smell of smoked fish gently poaching in milk wafting through the house as your folks or (more likely) grandparents whipped up a fish pie? Mixed feelings…
I’ve had a turbulent relationship with fish pie over the years and I’m still not quite sure where we stand. I want to love it, and I really ought to. On paper, it makes sense, perfect delicious sense, but in practise it has never hit the spot. The stars of a fish pie (the fish!) get lost in the miscellany of ingredients, clumsily coddled together. Boiled eggs, peas, mash, claggy white sauce and overcooked fish collide and argue over who can achieve the highest plane of bland. Sometimes, folks put cheese on top, too. Yes, that’s what this needed, cheese!? One day I hope to have a fish pie I enjoy, but until that day, I need to figure out what else to make with smoked haddock.
Smoked haddock is a real workhorse in the kitchen. It’s cheap, packed with flavour and if allowed to shine at the centre of a recipe can deliver pleasure in spades.
“Sure, sounds good, but what’s the yellow about” I hear you cry? The yellow colour is a result of the smoking process. As the fish is cold smoked over wood, it is stained by the smoke a yellowish brown colour. This gentle smoking traditionally takes place over a period of 10-12 hours, the long exposure to the smoke giving the fish its subtle yellow tinge. The vibrant custard yellow haddock you might scoop up from the supermarket is dyed (naturally, often with turmeric) to simulate this same process. The fish is still smoked, but much faster in electronic smokers that do the same job as the old school smokers in about 3 hours. It’s much faster, but you do lose that natural hue, the fish emerging a pale grey colour, hence the need for the turmeric dye.
Both are fine and perfectly tasty, responsibly sourced supermarket smoked haddock, will do the trick.
DASHI POWDER
This stuff is genius. For the uninitiated, dashi the word used to describe a family or style of stocks used in Japanese cooking. They’re often the base for a recipe and feature umami rich ingredients like seaweeds, dried fish or mushrooms.
I’ve made dashi at a handful of restaurants over the years, and it’s a finicky process, to say the least. There are a lot of rules when making traditional dashi… Filtered water, soaked kombu, a hyper specific ratio of dried bonito to seaweed (and not a gram more!!!) and never, ever let it boil. The results are otherworldly, but it is a labour of love and can be pretty expensive to make at home. Enter, dashi powder. I encountered this first in the kitchens of Orasay. We used it to make a brine with which to cure the seafood the restaurant was famous for. There’s a healthy amount of powdered kombu and katsuobushi (dried tuna) in the dashi powder and this gives cured fish a layer umami that you cannot achieve with a salt brine. Smart cooking prevails!
I find I didn’t need to add salt at all to this recipe, the dashi brings a real thwack of umami and the fish has a natural salinity , so a splash of soy does just enough to bring the soup from good to great. I do add a tiny drizzle of olive oil, just to add a shine to the soup and a touch of grassy richness.
You can buy this very brand right here for a mere £2.99, (the pack will make 10 soups, 20 portions!) so no excuses!
SOBA?
I’m tentatively calling this soba, purely because it has soba noodles in it and it’s a bit sexier than “smoked haddock soup”, so forgive me traditionalists, this is wholly untraditional (main offender: olive oil….).
The chewy, earthy, pleasantly gritty texture the buckwheat gives soba just adds to the nourishing energy of this recipe. If you can’t find soba, feel free to use whatever makes sense to you.