HARISSA COD PARCELS WITH "RATATOUILLE"
a delicious way to cook fish + a nod to old school technique.
Hello there,
Welcome back to How I Cook! This week we’re cooking fish in a slightly unconventional way. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you’ll know that I adore cooking seafood and am constantly on the lookout for new techniques to employ when cooking our aquatic friends. I’ve never cooked fish wrapped in cabbage before, but I have seen other things wrapped in cabbage and thought “yeh, that looks good”. You could call this a Mediterranean-leaning take on Golabki, a Polish dish of cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and minced meat. It’s absolutely packed with equal measures of veg and flavour. It feels quite old school in its execution and is very tasty indeed.
For music, we’re turning to muzak. It seems I can only go a few weeks without recommending an antipodean band, so we’re back in Melbourne for this week’s record of the week. Finally, a striking memoir from one of NYC’s greatest restaurators.
In exciting news, my book is only £20 on Amazon right now! That’s a bargain, pre-order here!
Thanks for reading,
B x
It’s a pretty cheffy trope, hiding food inside other food. The ultimate example is perhaps a beef wellington. A hulking construction of puff pastry, pancake, mushrooms, mustard and a great log of beef, all wrapped up in neatly and baked to blushing pink perfection. It’s a lot work and the stakes are high (beef fillet ain’t cheap!) but the payoff is spectacular. Slice through a wellington to reveal concentric circles of gout-inducing decadence. Stunning.
Today’s “stuffed” recipe is a much, much lighter affair, packed with vegetables and can be made midweek in under an hour. As with most chef-coded techniques, when broken down into steps, you’ll find that making these cod parcels is actually very easy to pull off. Are you new to stuffing food inside other food? This is a great place to start. Let’s get into it.
FLAVOURS
The main thing to consider when stuffing food inside other food is the medium of cooking and how to pack in as much flavour as you can. If you’re dealing with a big fat piece of meat, it would be smart to sear it before wrapping to develop a caramelised, maillard character inside. Once wrapped up, anything inside is going to steam, so if you want any caramelised, gnarly flavour, you’ve got to do that ahead of time. Fish is an ingredient that loves to be steamed, so we’re leaning into that with this recipe. Harissa delivers a thwack of punchy, savoury, spicy flavour to the parcel and basil brings a unique perfume to the party. Perfect steamy flavours.
WRAP IT UP
To tie or not to tie? That is the question.
This is a totally optional step but one that will make cooking the parcels much more straightforward. Sling a piece of butcher’s twine (every kitchen should have a spool of this in a drawer) around your parcel and tie it up as you would a birthday present and maneuvering your cod in the pan will be dead easy. If you are twine-less, when you lay your parcel into the pan, make sure it’s seam-side down to begin with. The initial sear should seal the parcel to an extent, but just go carefully when you flip it around!
THE SAUCE
