Welcome to Episode Four of the Underground Cookery School free videocast. What we’re going to do today is a fillet of bream. I’ll show you how to bone that out. We’re going to do it with broad bean and peas.
We’re also going to do the competition. Regular viewers will now know if you’ve entered your name in, and by doing so, it’s leaving a review on either Facebook or Google. Having been to one of my sessions, your name goes into the hat. We’ll do the prize draw for that.
As always, please let me have suggestions. I want you guys to be included in how we shape this program. So any ideas, suggestions, if you want to get involved, if you want to be in it, please let me know. It would be hugely helpful. Hope you enjoy it today.
Now that the sun’s out a little bit, I want to show you a nice sort of sunny dish. We’ve got some broad beans here, and I’m going to show you how to cook those. It’s very simple. All you do is just take them out of the pod. You’ve got to double pod these because we’re going to cook them. But what’s going to happen is these outer shells are quite waxy and, I don’t think, very flavoursome. So if we take that extra shell off, we’ll be fine.
We’re going to put those in there just to make life a little bit easier. Those will cook off for about a minute, and whilst those are cooking off, I’m just going to shell these peas. In the time it takes me to shell all of these, the ones behind me should be ready. We just want to get those outer skins off.
Right. I think that’s probably enough time. Those broad beans can come out, and as they come out, I’m just going to jump up here, health and safety. Got my peas in here, and those will go in. I don’t want to cook them too much. Probably for a minute and a half tops. No need in that. And as you can see, try to shell these.
Right. Those have been cooking for about a minute, minute and a half, certainly no more. You wouldn’t want them any longer. They go into a bowl, and now we’re going to mix the broad beans and the peas together.
Right. I’m just going to fillet this bream. The important thing is to note that you’ve got this big dorsal fin here and tail fin here. Just by using a flexible knife, you can just press into the flesh of the fish, and as long as you keep in line with both edges, you’ll find it’s very easy to fillet. If you just cut around the head, I mean, this is my way of doing it. There are lots of ways of doing it. You can take the top layer off. As you can see, I’ve already done the bottom one, just to give you an idea. Actually, the phone rang whilst we were filming the other one. Little bit annoying. But that gives you an idea, doesn’t it?
We’re not quite there yet, because what we then need to do, set that aside, we need to take out the rib cage, which is quite simple. But again, the flexibility of that knife really helps. So there’s one, and then there’s the other one. These aren’t all the bones in a round fish. You’ve got a row of what are called pin bones all the way along here, and actually, if you just use a pair of tweezers, you can pluck those out. Well, actually, you should put them back in a glass. So those keep going again. I’ll do the other side as well, and when you come back, we’ll start, ready to cook these bad boys.
Okay, we’re going to cook the fillets now. I’m just going to take a knob of butter, sort of reasonably generous. We’re going to put olive oil in as well, just to stop that from burning. And we’re going to slice some lemon, because I want a nice lemony, sort of buttery sort of sauce at the end, and I also want to make it easy to cook the fish. So it’s not really pan frying. It’s just creating something which we can put in the oven. Just make sure that you’ve got stainless steel handles.
I’m just going to mix that butter around, put those lemon in, just a little bit of olive oil on the top and some salt and pepper. I mean, you can go to town on this if you’d like. You can put fish seasoning or whatever you fancy, a bit of chilli powder, smoked paprika, whatever you’d like.
I’m just going to lay those fillets on. I’m going to leave them just for about 30 seconds, to carry on cooking. Then, like I said earlier, just finish them up in the oven. At the very end, when the fillets are cooked, what we’re going to do is to add a little bit more butter and some white wine and reduce that down. Just have a really nice little sauce to go with it.
Right. We can take those fish out of the oven now, those fillets, I should say. There we go. Those look lovely and cooked. There we go.
Now we’ve got quite a lot of residual pan juice, and I really want to use those to finish off our sauce. So I’m just going to add a little extra butter. Just under both fillets there should be extra lemon, and I’m going to use those in the sauce at the very end. A little bit of butter just melting off. I’ve got plenty of white wine. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to burn that wine off, so it’s going to take a minute or two. And whilst I do that, we can go and do something else, and we’ll come back the other side.
So that’s been cooking down for about a minute and a half now. I’m going to stop doing that. I’m just going to take that lemon confit, that went underneath the fish earlier on, and I’ve added it to the pan. I’m just going to cook that. We’re now ready. That sauce, I’m delighted with that. That’s absolutely gorgeous.
Here you have fillet of beam with pea and broad bean with a lovely lemon sauce.
The winner of the free pasta machine competition, for all those people that left a review on Facebook or Google, I’ll just show you so that you can see that there are actually names in here. And, here we go. Ah, it’s Nicola Jane B… I remember you actually, Nicola. So I look forward to being in touch with you for that.
Next time around I’m going to show you how to make a very simple tarte tatin. As always, thank you for your feedback. Thank you for watching. See you soon.