Sous Vide Skate

After my Saturday trip to the market I wanted some fish so it was off to Morrisons as they have the best fish in our area in my opinion. It was not a great day for fish as I discovered. No octopus or monk fish let alone turbot so I had to select from what was available. I managed to get a couple of nice skate wings. Pink and shinny with no smell of ammonia. Back home, a trawl of the internet brought up this rather interesting recipe ( http://www.911cheferic.com/component/yoorecipe/recipe/948-sous-vide-skate-lemongrass-court-bouillon).

After watching the rugby, preparing the oranges to make marmalade tomorrow and putting the shopping away I got ready to cook. That was when I read the recipe through properly and discovered I should have made a court bouillon some hours ago. If we were to eat this tonight I had to change the recipe. While I love to make a stock from scratch sometimes it just has to be a Knorr Stock Pot. 250 ml of white wine, 250 ml water, fish stock pot, 2 star anise, a few all spice berries and a teaspoon of fennel seed later and I had something resembling a court bouillon. A quick cool in an ice bath and we were ready to roll. The stock, a little fresh ginger, some lemongrass and the skate joined each other in the sous vide for an hour at 60 C while the fennel chose a hotter bath in my second sous vide at 85 C.

An hour later I took the bags out of the water baths. Seared some of the fennel in a hot skillet. Prepared the fish sauce, pureed the remaining fennel with the coriander leaves, bread crumbed and fried the skate and we finally sat down to a nice supper. After a pizza for lunch we decided one skate wing between too was sufficient for the supper so I still have one wing left to have a little fun with later in the week along with a slab of pollock.