We have been on a roll this month making fish recipes for French Fridays with Dorie. I couldn’t be happier. Fish is delicious, cooks quickly, is low in calories and high in nutrition. Yes, it is much better for you than any meat.
Spice-Crusted Tuna was the recipe for this week, but I am an extremist when it comes to tuna. I either like it raw or cooked and chopped up into a salad of some sort. I don’t like the seared outside, raw middle taste or texture combination that this week’s recipe called for…so I substituted swordfish, which was on sale, and it is a deep sea fish. I figured that the seasoning would work well on any cold water fish.
The recipe called for grinding up the seasoning in a mortar and pestle… really? Seriously mortar and pestle? Maybe for crushing mint leaves for a Mojito or making an occasional guacamole…but to crush cardamon pods and peppercorns? It’s the 21st century… I used a coffee grinder!
In the summer I often cover fish with rubs before cooking it on the grill, so I found the instructions for this recipe to be a bit odd. Spread oil over the fish and then rub on the spices? When I checked the P & Q someone had trouble with the seasoning staying on the fish. I wasn’t surprised. Most rub recipes that I’ve ever used call for drying the fish well with paper towels, and then rubbing it with the seasoning before putting it in a hot skillet with just a coating of oil. I used this technique and the seasoning stayed on well. A note: I also used dried ginger instead of fresh grated ginger which is wet. I wanted the rub to be totally dry so it would stick without a problem.
The spice mixture was subtle. It didn’t have enough POW for my husband, but the rest of us liked it. I do usually associate strong flavors with rubs, but I thought that this flavor mixture enhanced the taste of the fish, instead of overpowering it the way some strong rubs can do.
Thanks to Dorie’s Olive and Orange Salad I am really into citrus salads for the winter. I served the swordfish with this Mark Bittman recipe: Winter Citrus Salad and Honey Dressing, along with Saffron rice. The beauty of cooking fish is that it takes so little time to prepare, you can have it for a midweek meal, and feel like you’ve gone out to an elegant restaurant.
- Seeds from 6 cardamon pod
- 2 teaspoons of black peppercorn
- 2 teaspoons coriander seeds
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon fleur de sel or other sea salt
- 1 tablespoon of extra-virgin-olive oil (EVOO)
- 4 pieces of swordfish about 2 pounds