Recipe 31: Basque Hake

This is one actually cooked back in the summer while enjoying the August sunshine of Andalucia, but it's taken a little while for it to come online... I'm pleased to say that this is a delightfully easy and very tasty dish (isn't that almost always the way with fish dishes?) that benefits from it's source being a video from the Guardian website. 

So, apart from the ingredients, you get a little bit of fishing culture and so on in what can only be described as a 'magazine article' about Basque cooking and a demonstration of how to cook it by Michelin-starred chef Dani Lopez. Worth a watch, and not only for the amazing recipe, which is recreated here your reading...

Ingredients:

Hake fillet (one steak-sized piece per person)	100-200ml fish stock (ideally made from hake bones)
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped	Dried guindilla pepper or other pepper (e.g. chilli)
Handful of parsley, chopped	Clams (3 per person)
Tbsp. plain flour	Hake kokoxtas (the little gelatinous bit on the jaw of the fish)  - I couldn’t sauce these so just doubled the clam portion
Good splash of white wine	Fried garlic and garlic flower to garnish J

1. Fillet the hake (video shows you how to do this), ensuring you pin bone the fillets as necessary. Or just buy them filleted from the fish monger. This is what I ended up doing. However, this does mean you can’t use the hake bones to make the fish stock and will have to rely on a shop-bought stock or one you’ve prepared earlier).

2. Coat the base of a pan in olive oil and add garlic and a little of the pepper (just to add a subtle heat). Once the garlic starts to ‘dance’, add a little flour to thicken the sauce. Now add the splash of white wine and then the stock. Allow this to boil to thicken up.

3. Put in the hake, flesh side down, to poach it in the light sauce. If the sauce looks a little dry, add a bit more stock. Cover and poach for a couple of minutes only – be sure not to overdo it!

4. Very carefully (the flesh is nice and delicate), turn over the fillet. A good spatula will aid you in this. Now add clams and kokoxtas. Cover and poach for about 2 minutes, until the clams have opened up.

5. Plate up with 3 clams and 3 kokoxtas per person, drizzle over  a little of the sauce and top with the garlic and flower. This didn't feature in my dish and, if you compare mine with Mr Michelin-Star Chef, my presentation's not quite up there either. However, it did taste damn good, though.  

If you’ve got plenty sauce, I imagine you’ll do as I did and have more so that you can soak it up with some good, crusty bread. Very good. Very, very good, in fact.

Today’s tip:

The quality of the fish stock really does make a difference. The ‘whiter’ the stock, the more attractive the dish. I’ve also tried this with prawns when I couldn’t source clams and it was still pretty tasty. I reckon you could use this recipe for most forms of white, fleshy fish.

Today’s learning:

Hake is the most sustainable fish in the UK but of the 12,000 tonnes landed each year, only 2% is consumed in the UK. Time to eat more, me thinks!