Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade

Each time we go to or through Newberg, a town about 20 minutes from the house, we make a point to go to the fish market there. Although the prices are spendy, the quality is extremely good. On this trip, I bought a small piece of halibut for our dinner. 

With a mild white fish such as halibut, I love a salty element to complement it and tapenade is high on my list of salty condiments, being a mixture of olives, capers, and anchovies.

Pan-Seared Halibut with Black Olive Tapenade
and Roasted Haricots Filets

Tapenade Ingredients: Capers, Kalamata Olives, Garlic, Thyme

While we used to buy salted anchovies by the kilo at the restaurant, I have no access to them here in the Willamette Valley. To compensate, I will often add a splash of fish sauce to those dishes that require anchovies. In this case, I had plenty of fish flavor from the halibut, so I went ahead without anchovies. For this quantity of olives and depending on the size of the anchovies, I would probably peel one filet off the backbone for this tapenade. If the anchovy were tiny as sometimes happens, I would use perhaps both filets.

Finished Tapenade

To make the tapendade, I just chopped all the ingredients and mixed them right on the cutting board. Tapenade really is that simple. I don't like to put small quantities in the food processor: the texture is better when cut by hand.

Green Beans Tossed in Olive Oil, Ready to Roast

French Black Steel Puts a Beautiful Crust on Fish

My Secret Fish Spatula

Years ago, I had a couple nice French fish spatulas, which seem to be all the rage among chefs, but they just never suited me. In the professional kitchen, you have a personal relationship with your tools and if something doesn't work, it is time to move on. I ended up giving my fish spatulas to two of my junior cooks.

My preference is a big perforated pancake spatula that I have cooked with for 30-plus years that suits my hand and has turned tens of thousands of pieces of fish and scallops. There are a couple of times when the big spatula is not the best tool for the job: in a pan that is loaded with closely spaced scallops and when cooking long, slender pieces of fish such as the halibut in the photo above.

In cases like this, I go into my pastry toolbox and get out a Matfer offset icing spatula which is a perfect tool, even if designed for another use. Being a sauté guy, I have turned way more fish with this spatula than I have iced cakes!

Halibut Deserves a Great Pinot Noir

Please don't tell me that red wine and fish don't go together. Please. Besides being utter nonsense, it is also utter nonsense. In America, we really focus on what wine goes with which food. Is it any wonder that a great many people are put off of wine because all these "rules?" Granted that some fish and red wine is a train wreck and some wine and food pairings are astoundingly more than the sum of their parts, but I had a real eye opening in France many decades ago. The French do things differently: except in the non-wine producing areas, everyone drinks the local wine with whatever they're eating, pairing be damned.

A case in point: on one trip to wine country, we ended up in a small restaurant in the town of Romanèche-Thorins, home to Georges Duboeuf, in the Beaujolais. For the table, we ordered a simply roasted Bresse chicken. And what did we drink? The same thing that all the other tables were drinking: Cru Beaujolais, red wine with roast chicken, something that breaks all the so-called "rules" in the US.

In any case, halibut is a mild meaty fish that loves to be paired with a lighter red wine. The earthy and salty flavors in the tapenade really help marry the wine and the fish. And of course, we're drinking local because we live (intentionally) in one of the very best wine growing areas of the world. For our halibut, we chose a wine from a small producer made from Coury clone Pinot Noir from one of the great vineyards in Oregon, planted in 1971. It was a great pairing.