Canarian · Main · From the menu Huerta
Stone bass, green mojo, heritage potato
Cherne, mojo verde, papa antigua
The most Canarian plate I cook. Cherne with the skin crisped hard and dry, green mojo underneath, and heritage potatoes crushed rather than mashed. Three elements, no sauce reduction, nothing hiding the fish.
Something worth knowing: the Canarian recipes for cherne do not tell you how to sear it. I read five of them and not one gives a time, a pan temperature or an internal temperature. On the island this is an oven fish, a stew fish, a sancocho fish, and the plancha is treated as something you already know. So the numbers below come from the people who have written that technique down properly, on other thick white fish, and the fish itself takes them without complaint.
Ingredients
- 6 cherne (stone bass) fillets, about 160 g each and 2.5 cm thick, skin on and scaled
- 800 g papas antiguas or small waxy potatoes
- 300 ml mojo verde
- 60 ml olive oil, 30 ml per pan
- 30 g butter
- 1 lemon
- Coarse salt, flaked salt, white pepper
Method
- An hour before service, score the skin of each fillet: three or four slashes about a centimetre apart and no more than 3 mm deep, through the skin but not into the flesh. Salt the skin only, then sit the fillets skin up on a rack, uncovered, in the fridge.
- Boil the potatoes in well salted water until tender, drain, and crush them roughly with a fork with a little olive oil and salt. Leave them coarse. Keep warm.
- Take the fish out and pat the skin completely dry with kitchen paper. It has been drying for an hour and it still needs this.
- Heat a heavy pan empty for about two minutes, then add 30 ml of oil. Six fillets will not fit in one pan without touching, so use two pans or two batches.
- Lay the fillets in skin side down, away from you, and press each one flat with a fish slice for twenty to thirty seconds. The skin contracts the moment it hits the heat, and pressing is the only thing keeping all of it against the pan.
- Leave them alone. Start high, then drop to medium-low and give them six to eight minutes on the skin, until the flesh has turned opaque all the way up the side bar the top 6 mm or so. If the oil smokes at any point, or the sides of the fish start to brown, lower the heat until the oil sizzles without smoking.
- Add the butter, turn the fish, and take the pan off the heat: thirty seconds to a minute on the flesh side is enough, and the residual heat does it. Squeeze a little lemon into the butter and spoon it over the flesh, never over the skin.
- Pull the fish at 52 to 55 °C in the centre. Rest it three minutes on a rack, skin up.
- Spoon mojo verde onto warm plates, the crushed potato beside it, and the fish on top skin up. Flaked salt on the skin at the last second.
Serve it with. Nothing else. The mojo is the sauce and the potato is the starch; a third element only makes a mess of it.