Tuesday, July 25, 2006

A recipe


One of the most famous dishes at Nobu is Black Cod with Miso. We tried it at the Nobu in Vegas in March and it was incredibly delicious. (It's so good that you want to have another one for desert.) My friend Jen Kelly saw Nobu prepare it on one of Martha Stewart's programs a few months ago and passed the recipe along to me. Since then, we've had it made it half a dozen times at home. It is both astonishingly delicious and astonishingly easy to prepare. Why fork over vast sums of your hard earned money so that Nobu can open 27 more Nobus when you can get essentially the same result in the comfort of your own home. Here's the recipe as he prepared it for Martha, with some notes based on my experience.

Nobu’s Black Cod with Miso

3/4 cup white miso
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup mirin
1/2 cup sake
Four (6 ounce) black cod or sea bass fillets, cut about 3/4 –inch thick

1. In a saucepan, whisk together miso, sugar, mirin, and sake. Cook until thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, about 10 minutes. Transfer to a shallow baking dish. Add fish, turning to coat. Cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 3 days.

2. Preheat broiler to high. Remove fish from marinade, and place on a baking sheet, skin-side down. Broil until caramelized, about 3 minutes. Using a flat spatula, gently turn fish, and broil until just opaque in center, about 3 minutes more. Serve immediately.

Some notes:

1. There seem to be a number of different versions of this recipe floating around the internerds. Wolfgang Puck’s version has somewhat different amounts of the same ingredients—3/4 cup mirin, 1/2 cup sake, 2 cups white miso, and 1 cup sugar.

2. Jen Kelly—who, unlike Wolfgang Puck, is not a famous chef—has tried it while cutting back on the sugar and reports perfectly satisfactory results.

3. Mirin is Japanese rice wine. You can find it at Holy Foods as well as at Asian markets. The only place I’ve been able to find white miso is at an Asian market. I recall reading somewhere that this recipe is also good with red miso (which is aged a bit more).

4. Puck suggests that you start with the mirin and sake in the pan and let it boil for about 20 seconds to cook off some of the alcohol. He also suggests that you let the mixture cool before you put it onto the fish. We haven’t done either, with perfectly fine results. He also suggests you save a little of the miso mixture to put on the plate before you serve it, which is a smashing idea.

5. In Boston, black cod and sea bass aren’t that easy to find. (Holy Foods sometimes has black cod, but don’t count on it.) We’ve done the same recipe with Atlantic cod and hake, with perfectly delicious results.

6. Nobu must get his fish right off the boat. I’m not so sure about ours. Hence, I’ve been a little reluctant to let it marinate for the three days he suggests. We’ve done it for as many as two days and for as little as three hours, with—once again—perfectly delicious results—though, in general, the more time in the marinade, the more delicious it will be.

7. I suspect our broiler doesn’t get quite as hot as Nobu’s, so I recommend that you let it go for about four minutes on each side. You want it to develop quite a bit of carmelization on both sides.

8. Be sure to spray the pan with some cooking spray or you’ll never—and I mean never—get it clean.

9. Finally, serve with sushi rice.

Posted by jwb at 10:15 AM   

1 Comments:

Blogger jwb said:

I've since discovered that you can find white miso at Whole Foods--in the section with tofu and other veggie-friendly foods.
at 10:57 AM     

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