Spiced Monkfish
With roasted cauliflower, peanut crumble, the most savage cookbook review you've ever read, and a far-fetched marketing myth about lobsters.
Setting the Table
Welcome to more new people! I was browsing cookbooks this week and came across what is now my favourite ever cookbook review [1], which I consider my civic duty to share with you. Here’s an excerpt that perfectly encapsulates how I feel about a lot of fancy cookbooks:
Is it good bedtime reading? There’s certainly reading, though how good it is will depend on how much you like fantasy writing. That is, the fantasy that you’ll ever actually cook anything from this book.”
Even I’m not foolish enough to try a cookbook that requires sourcing reindeer hearts (seriously!). So I settled for Eleven Madison Park: The Next Chapter, which will hopefully be entering the recipe rotation in future posts.
If you’ve been here before, skip ahead! For the benefit of first-time readers, cookbook recipe write-ups are structured as follows:
Amuse-bouche - the history and provenance of the dish
Starters - an intro to the fancy Michelin version of the dish I’ll be cooking
Main courses - the actual cooking process
Desserts - thoughts and conclusions on what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what tasted good
Petit Fours - footnotes and references
Amuse-Bouche
Monkfish. So named because their heads look like the cowls worn by monks. Or because fisherman used to have trouble selling them due to their ugliness and gave them to monks who showed up at the docks. Or because they’re silent creatures and often found in solitude. Ok, I made that last one up, but who really knows?
Monkfish are often described as the “poor man’s lobster” due to their similarities in taste and texture, and uh, no? They taste nothing alike, monkfish aren’t cheap, and the only things they have in common with lobsters are that (1) they live in the sea and (2) they have tails, which narrows it down to roughly 22,000 species.
It’s quite obviously a marketing gimmick cooked up (sorry) by Big Monkfish Inc. who wanted to sell their monkfish for some coin instead of giving it away for free to monks. Nonetheless, monkfish are very tasty in their own right, with firm, mild-tasting meat that holds up to roasting, pan frying, and even grilling on the barbecue. But don’t let anyone tell you it’s like lobster (or lamb, for that matter) [3].
Starters
Continuing with Kerridge’s Hand & Flowers cookbook, this is a much simpler recipe than last week’s. Not a whole lot to say here really - there’s some monkfish, cauliflower cooked two ways, and some relatively simple garnishes. Definitely one of the more achievable recipes in the book.
Main Courses
Cured monkfish
Right off the bat, I encounter a minor problem. Monkfish vary in size and can grow to over 2 metres long. The recipe calls for a 1.2kg beast of a monkfish tail, and the one I’ve procured weighs in at a measly 350g.
This means I have to make some adjustments to the salt cure. A smaller fish will cure much faster for two reasons: (1) it has a much higher surface area-to-volume ratio, so you can’t scale down the curing mix based on weight; and (2) the salt has a lot less depth to penetrate down to the centre.
From there, it’s a very simple sous vide and pan fry finish.
Roasted cauliflower purée
For the second time in as many weeks, the cookbook calls for a Thermomix and I still do not have one. So it’s back to the MacGyver method of sous vide + blender to make a steaming hot pile of purée. In hindsight, there’s a much easier way to do this (which will feature in this week’s recipe post - I can’t be giving away all my secrets at once).
Roasted cauliflower
This felt like a missed opportunity here to cross-promote one of Kerridge’s many healthy eating cookbooks. Because this is literally a plain cauliflower steak seasoned with sea salt, cooked in a frying pan.
I mean, I’m not ungrateful for the occasional simple component in these recipes, but we probably could have done a little more here?
Garnishes
The most interesting part for me was the shallot, chive and verjus dressing, mainly because I had no idea what verjus was.
Verjus (or verjuice) comes from the Middle French vertjus (literally ‘green juice’, duh), and is an acidic juice made from unripe grapes or other sour fruits. It was widely used in the Middle Ages, until it was eventually overtaken by vinegar.
I did a side-by-side tasting against white wine vinegar, and my tasting notes were as follows:
Smells sweet and fruity, quite similar to apple juice
Unlike vinegar, it’s actually possible to drink a sip of this
You could probably use this stuff to make a decent drink (And I was right! The Verjus Spritz is a real thing!
The second garnish was semi-dried white grapes, where I defied the cookbook’s insistence on selling me a dehydrator, and used the oven instead. At the risk of raisin’ your expectations (sorry), these little semi-dried grapes are very delicious and I highly recommend making them - they’re like big raisins with a grape-flavoured jelly sweet in the middle. They also require no effort - stick a bunch of grapes in the oven at 80°C / 176°F for 4 hours, and you’re good to go.
Lastly, there was a peanut crumble, which was a bit of a faff and also quite boring, so we’re not gonna talk about it too much.
Desserts
Umm, I have thoughts… Let’s start with the good.
The monkfish was lovely. Firm, meaty texture thanks to the sous vide, and a good vessel for the strong flavours of cumin and coriander seeds. It reminded me of a grilled pollock with curry leaf I had in 2017 at The Clove Club (one of my favourite restaurants in London). Dry-curried meats and fish should be on more menus. Portion-wise, however, it was a bit of a challenge to get a lot of fish on the plate while keeping everything pretty.
The cauliflower purée is a swipe of pure heaven. Yes, it has an unfair advantage because one third of it is butter and heavy cream. But it’s the depth and richness of flavour from the caramelised cauliflower edges, browned butter, and burnt cream that combine to truly elevate this dish.
The first two thoughts that came to my mind after eating this were (1) I would happily have it on toast; and (2) It’s such a perfect blend of sweet and savoury that I could build a dessert dish around this.
With that, it’s on to the less good…
Visually, it’s dull. The dish is mostly just various shades of beige and brown. My plating wasn’t perfect, but even the professional photoshoot version of the dish from the cookbook didn’t look particularly enticing.
The cauliflower steak is aesthetically pretty, but doesn’t have much going on flavour-wise. It was also slightly undercooked in the middle. I’m sure it works on a hot plancha in a restaurant kitchen, which has a lot more radiant heat, but an adjustment needs to be made if it’s only going to be charred in a frying pan.
The garnishes were unremarkable. In an ideal world, I think garnishes should enhance both the look and taste of a dish. However, the peanuts and raisins made me think I was eating a bag of trail mix, which didn’t feel very gourmet.
So overall, a bit of a mixed bag, and that’s fine! Not every recipe is going to work out perfectly, and personal preference is such a big factor in food. The core of the dish was still rock solid, and the issues are all very easily fixed. That’s a convenient segue into my post later this week, where I’ll be fixing the issues, putting my spin on the dish, and writing up my version of this recipe for you to make yourself! Until then, happy cooking!
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
[1] I’m very tempted to buy this cookbook, purely just to hate-read it. Here are more of my favourite excerpts.
“My favourite, for what it’s worth, is the casual request for 400ml of fresh bovine colostrum, which the glossary at the back of the book helpfully defines as ‘the milk a cow produces during the first days after calving’.”
“Ekstedt has made no noticeable concessions for the home chef, except that he lets you flambadou your beef fat in a pan. A typical recipe might ask you to ‘hot smoke the parsley root for 10 hours every day for 1-2 weeks until it is dried out’. Who does he think I am? I think Niklas Ekstedt has mistaken me for his sous chef.”
[2] Extra-curricular monkfish research.
I had to double check that monkfish have mothers, because I know some fish exhibit evolved hermaphroditism. It turns out monkfish do have mothers, but their close relatives, the anglerfish have a more complicated situation, which also happens to be the greatest ocean-based love story since Titanic. Enjoy.
[3] More marketing from Big Monkfish Inc.
In France, a whole roast monkfish is known as Gigot de Mer, which roughly translates as “leg of lamb of the sea”. People will say absolutely anything to sell you a monkfish.
(P.S. Yes, I know the lamb comparison actually refers to the method of preparation, not the taste of the fish. Don’t @ me.)