By Greg B.   “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days’ – Benjamin Franklin.  With this quote from a great founder of the US, I will begin writing about a fish that I was given.  Fresh caught 2 days prior (it didn’t smell at all, old Ben was right!) by my good friend Georgia, and expertly cleaned and scaled by her husband Bart, this whole fish was offered to me.  Most likely because Georgia would only feed her family fish so many nights in a row before getting bored and seeking alternative food styles.  However, you wont hear me complain.  A whole, fresh fish for free?  There’s not a chance that I’d turn something like this down!  And in order to cook it the best I could, I headed up to Mike’s house to let him experiment with it.  Mike’s culinary aptitude is unparalleled among my friends and so bringing food to his house to cook is probably the best way to get a great and very tasty meal without paying the high price for a good restaurant!  And while I kind of knew we would be making this fish in a salt-encrusted style, the stuffing was something I’d have never thought of.

Typically, the best ways to prepare and eat fish tend to be the simplest.  And this recipe, while sounding complex, really is not.  Here’s an ingredients list.

• 1 Whole and cleaned Striped Bass (Rockfish) ~ 7lbs
• 1 Asian pear, peeled and sliced
• 1 Green apple, sliced
• 5-6lbs of coarse sea salt
• 5 eggs
• Nutmeg
• Cracked black pepper
• Olive oil
• White wine

I arrived at Mike’s house with a large bag of coarse sea salt and a whole fish wrapped in a few trash bags.  While this may sound like something that would happen early in a murder/mystery novel, the events of the evening were much more positive (depending on which side of a mystery novel you side with… maybe you like the antagonist, there’s nothing wrong with this and we’re not here to judge).  I was initially just going to do a simple salt/pepper/lemon preparation, but Mike decided we should roast an Asian pear… and then an apple.  While this was a good idea, it was already 8pm and everyone was hungry.  Roasting these fruits would take a while, so we accelerated the process by cooking the slices in a skillet, with some olive oil, cracked black pepper and a few dashes of nutmeg.  Now I know what you’re thinking: Nutmeg… in a fish preparation?  How is that even going to work?!  Well, I’ll tell you how.  Rockfish is a rather fatty fish.  While it may not be as fatty as mackerel or bluefish, it’s a heck of a lot more tasty and fatty than lame whitefish or flounder.    And with the sweetness of the cooked fruits inside the sweeter fish meat, a little nutmeg will go a long way to bringing the flavors of fall together in this dish.

In a salt encrusted prep, the actual salt crust is key.  You don’t want something too watery, where the salt really seeps into the food and over-salts the food.  The salt needs to be able to hold some kind of form, especially when packing the fish along the sides.  Cracks in the salt crust will lead to water escaping, and drying of the fish flesh. In this case, we had somewhere between 5-6lbs of salt, probably tending towards the 5lb side.  In a large bowl, we combined 4 eggs at first, mixed very well then tested the consistency.  For this, simply take a handful of salt, roll your hand and squeeze the mixture.  If the salt holds together at a level that you deem appropriate for packing, then you’ve got the right consistency.  We decided to add another egg, as well as a splash of white wine, an Alsatian Riesling.

While the cooked fruits are cooling (you don’t want to put very hot fruit inside the fish, as it’ll be cooking it before you intend!) in the fridge, we made a ‘bed of the salt mixture in a baking dish.  Pre-heat the oven to 400F as well.  Make sure the bottom salt bed is well packed together, and is larger than the actual size of the fish.  Give the fish a good rinse, just to remove any clotted blood or guts or anything else on it that you might not want to consume.  Then place on the salt bed, stuff the fish with the stuffing, give the fish a little salt/pepper and olive oil before you begin burying it in salt.  Really make sure you cover all of the fish with the crust, covering the head and body.  You can leave the tail poking out if you are running out of salt for packing, as we were.  Once the fish is entombed, gently place it in the oven and bake for about an hour.

In the meantime, we prepared some sides.  A vegetable medley with an Asian twist (addition of soy sauce, white wine) as well as chopped red pears with some sugar,  walnuts, touch of white wine to deglaze.  The vegetables were cooked in a wok, while the pear/walnut mixture was toasted in a pan on the stove top before roasting in the oven.  You might want to prepare this in advance of preparing the fish, just to give it plenty of time to really cook down, though by the time dinner was finished this had become a great topping for an ice cream desert!

After an hour, we removed the fish from the oven and let it sit for a few minutes, to let the juices settle.  You can really tell the crust as formed good and solid because it will brown slightly while in the oven, and it will be firm to the touch.  Crack open the crust and remove it from the fish.  It should come apart in large chunks, though if it does not, simply brush the salt aside.  The fish meat will most likely be very tender, so remove the fish flesh from the top half of the fish, remove the spine, then extract the rest of the meat from the salt bed.

Serve with whatever sides you want.  For this fall preparation, we matched the sweetness of the fish meat with a stuffing of apples, Asian pear and nutmeg.  The fish meat was extremely tender, and extremely delicious.  You could tell the areas of the fish that were in close contact with the fruit stuffing, as the sweetness really permeated the fish meat.  If we were making this again, we might recommend you mince up the stuffing and coat the inside of the fish, rather than keeping the fruits in large slices.  This may facilitate the stuffing flavoring the fish.  However, as it was, you could really get a sense of the flavor of the fish, the texture was great and for pairing with a 2001 Leon Bayer Alsatian Riesling les Ecaillers.  The minerality of the wine brought out the fresh fish flavor, and any sweetness matched very well the stuffing and the fish itself.  A great choice for the dinner paring which really helped to elevate the flavors in the meal!