Hi. I’m going to show you how to make roasted sea bass on the bone, and we’re going to do a curried cauliflower with that and an onion confit. If you’ve just come home and you want something healthy and lovely to eat, this is the perfect dish.
The first thing to do is – I’ve cut this in half. “What have you cut in half?” An onion, and I’m just taking off the outer skin. The way I’m going to slice is digging my nails in and using that. So it’s just good to know how to do that. It’s also good to have quite a sharp knife as well. All the ones that I do like go into this pan, and then just a little drizzle of olive oil. This is more just so that the fish can rest on something, but if it’s going to rest on something, it may as well be something that you can eat.
We’ve then got the sea bass. I’ve got just a little bit of black pepper in there, a little bit of salt, a bit of thyme, some lemon, and some whole garlic, because then it really penetrates the flesh of the skin [sic]. It gives it a lovely garlicky flavour.
The next thing is just gently score the skin of the fish. It stops it from bubbling up. Just rub some olive oil into both sides, actually. A little bit of seasoning. I think the benefit of this dish is so that I can show you how to take all the bones out afterwards. I think the golden rule with any cooking is if you cook it on the bone it’s always going to taste much nicer. So that’s the fish, and that’s going to go in the oven in a sec.
But before we do that, what I’m going to do is just get the cauliflower going. I’m just going to put a little drop of olive oil in the pan. You can see it has a nice sizzle there. Now those onions will gently fry off for a second. I’m just going to put some garlic in now, a little bit of coriander powder, cumin, probably about half a teaspoon each, turmeric, and chili powder. I’m just going to mix those in.
And now I’ve got some cooked cauliflower, which goes in, and then finally I’m just going to stick the sea bass in the old oven.
That’s now beautifully cooked, as is our cauliflower. The next part of this job is to get the fillet off. The first thing I’m doing is just taking off the tail and all the fins along here. Then I’m just going to peel off the skin. You should find that because it’s perfectly cooked, it just literally falls off, like that.
Now what I’m going to do is cut round the head and then take off, by tilting it towards me, and pressing against the bone, you’ll find that the meat just falls off. The other side will come away, too, and then you can take the skin off the other side. This then comes away, and then there are some bones along the side, which I’m going to take out.
I’m just going to take the onions, this is a lovely onion confit, and that will form the base of the dish.
Put this lovely curried cauliflower on top. I don’t want to create too high a base, because we’ve got lots of lovely cooked bass, which I just want to stick on top. And then I’m just going to have a tiny bit of micro herb on top. Drizzle of olive oil, and then you have sea bass with curried cauliflower and an onion confit.
Next time we’re going to be doing oxtail with chickpeas and tomato sauce, so three things to show you there. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it.
