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Pete Evans's Ocean perch with roasted tomato and fennel sauce August 8, 2009 Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. When cooking fish, I don’t think you can go much past sprinkling it with a little flour and seasoning then pan-frying it in a shallow film of oil. However, this can become a little boring if you eat fish regularly. A while back I reviewed Pete Evans’s Fish cookbook and tagged a few recipes that took my fancy. When pan-fried fish fatigue set in this week I seized on the Ocean perch with roasted tomato and fennel sauce. I didn’t have any ocean perch, but I did have a couple of fillets of warehou. This fish, seriolella brama, is a member of the trevalla family. It is very moderately priced, holds its form while cooking and has a medium fat content. It is a cousin of the more expensive blue-eye trevalla. While this isn’t the best season of the year to be using tomatoes, considering this, the sauce turned out to be very flavoursome. I used fleshy red romas, and the red wine vinegar added just the right amount of depth that might otherwise have been lacking. I also substituted some black Korean garlic for the garlic confit, which is essentially 200g peeled garlic cloves cooked in 250ml olive oil on the lowest possible heat for two hours. It can be kept in a screw top jar in the fridge. Evans uses the oil to dress pasta, salads and seafoods. I served ours with chunks of butternut squash, drizzled with oil, sprinkled with seasoning and sesame seeds, and roasted. Here is Evans's original recipe.
Ocean perch with roasted tomato and fennel sauce 400g vine-ripened tomatoes 4 x 160-189g ocean perch fillets, skin and bone removed To make the sauce, pre-heat the oven to 180C. Put the tomatoes and fennel on a baking tray with a little sea salt and a dash of the oil and roast until the tomato skins split. Remove from the oven and peel off the skins. If the fennel isn’t tender, keep roasting until it is. Blend the tomatoes, fennel, fennel seeds and garlic until smooth and then put in a pan and cook until the sauce has thickened to a consistency you like. Whisk in the remaining oil and red wine vinegar and season with sea salt and cracked pepper. Wrap each ocean perch fillet with three slices of prosciutto and place in a roasting tin. Drizzle with the oil and roast for 8-10 minutes. Alternatively cook on a hot barbecue until golden on all sides. Spoon some warm tomato and fennel sauce onto each plate, then top with the ocean perch and a dollop of aioli. Serves 4. Recipe © Pete Evans Photograph © Pat Churchill Footnote: Pete Evans's latest book, My Grill - Food for the Barbecue, has just been released.
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