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The French Basque & Gascony · Main

Ttoro de Saint-Jean-de-Luz

  • Advanced
  • 45 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost

briny · aromatic · nutty-toasted · bright Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, aromatics blooming from the first bite, with a clean, bright snap.

Ingredients

  • 1 kg hake and monkfish heads and bones, gills cut out, rinsed until the water runs clear
  • 8 langoustines, heads on
  • 600 g hake, in 4 thick pieces on the bone
  • 400 g monkfish tail, in 4 pieces
  • 500 g mussels, scrubbed and debearded
  • 250 g onions and 1 leek, chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 400 g tomatoes, chopped
  • 150 ml dry white wine
  • 2 tsp piment d'Espelette
  • 45 ml olive oil
  • 8 slices of baguette, toasted and rubbed with raw garlic
  • salt

The skills inside

Reducing a sauceSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilStraining & passing through a sieveSkimming: foam, fat and a clear broth

The words inside

Mussels, Scallops & the Cold-Water Winter

Allergen screen

Found: gluten · fish · shellfish · molluscs · alcohol

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

  1. Cover the heads and bones with cold water, bring them to a bare tremble, skim the grey scum until the surface runs clear, hold twenty minutes only, then strain without pressing the bones.
  2. Fry the langoustines hard in the olive oil until the shells turn brick and the pan smells toasted, lift them out, and sweat the onion, leek and garlic in that same fat until slack.
  3. Add the tomatoes and wine and reduce until the pan smells of fruit rather than alcohol, stir in the Espelette, pour in the strained fumet and simmer ten minutes.
  4. Drop the heat until the surface only shivers, around 85C (185F), and stage the fish: monkfish first, hake three minutes behind it, mussels and langoustines last.
  5. It is done when the hake parts into white curd along its flakes and the mussels have just gaped. Ladle over the garlic toasts.

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.

Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes

  • It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
  • The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
  • Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
  • The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
  • Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.

Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.

Reducing a sauce 95 recipes

  • A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
  • Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
  • The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
  • Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
  • Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.

Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.

At the Table

The Pour
Albariño or Muscadet
Also Right
Assyrtiko or Vermentino
From the Taps
Witbier
Zero-Proof
Sparkling water with lemon

The Atlantic’s whites beside the sea’s own liquor: salinity in sympathy, acid keeping everything bright.

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Ttoro de Saint-Jean-de-Luz The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the The French Basque & Gascony kitchen