North Carolina · Soup
Carolina Fish Stew
- Intermediate
- 75 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a warm current of chile.
Ingredients
- 1kg firm white fish (rockfish or catfish), in large pieces
- 150g streaky bacon, diced
- 3 onions, sliced
- 800g potatoes, in thick slices
- 400g crushed tomatoes
- 1L water or fish stock
- 4 eggs (optional, for poaching)
- 2 tsp red pepper flakes
- Salt, black pepper, and hot sauce
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs outSteaming: basket, leaf and lidThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
Allergen screen
Found: egg · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the bacon in a heavy pot; lift out the bits.
- Layer the onions and potatoes in the pot, add the tomatoes, water, and red pepper, and simmer 25 min until the potatoes soften. 25 min
- Lay the fish on top, cover, and poach gently 12 min without stirring; stirring breaks the fish. 12 min
- Crack the eggs onto the surface if using and poach 4 min in the steam. 4 min
- Season hard, scatter the bacon over, and ladle out carefully so the fish stays whole.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
Steaming: basket, leaf and lid 130 recipes
- Steam was running before the food went in: the water at a rolling boil and vapour coming steadily through the basket, rather than the whole thing warming up together.
- Nothing touches the water at any point: the food sits clear of it throughout, and the level neither drops enough to boil dry nor rises enough to wet it.
- The lid stayed on. Every lift costs the chamber its heat, and the number of lifts should be as close to none as the dish allows.
- Lifted out, the surface is glossy and plump with its colour heightened rather than dulled: greens brighter than they went in, not olive.
- Cooked through with the shape intact: it yields at the centre without having slumped or split, and there is no more than a spoonful of clean condensate beneath it.
Where it goes wrong The lid was loose or dripping and the condensate fell back onto the food, so it arrives waterlogged and pale with its seasoning washed down into the bottom of the dish.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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