Sablefish with Pimentón White Beans and Piquillo Salad

We brought home a gorgeous piece of ultrarich sablefish recently, but the rest of the cupboard was pretty bare promising some difficulty in coming up with a presentation for the fish. When ideas are hard to come by, I know just what to do. My food ideas flow best when I have my hands on food, such as at the market or farmers market. At the restaurant, I would often go into either the walk-in or the pantry and paw my way through the inventory to start the idea flow.

Naturally, I started rummaging our home pantry to get an idea for what to do. I spied a bottle of Sherry vinegar and that was all it took to get the ideas zooming about my head. The association went something like: Sherry vinegar, Spain, Spanish ingredients, that leftover half a jar of piquillo peppers in the fridge, a nice garnish of a piquillo salad, peppers, smoked paprika, smoked paprika wants some kind of neutral foil to let it do its smoky thing, white beans, white bean purée, fini.

Including salt and garlic, this dish comprises seven ingredients. One thing that I continually impressed on my line cooks in our daily menu meetings was to simplify dishes and not to add items just because they might be cool. Each item in a dish should be there for a specific well-founded reason. A hallmark of a veteran chef is knowing when enough is enough.

Sablefish with Pimentón White Beans and Piquillo Salad

That said, I would have made a couple additions to this dish at the restaurant. First, I would have made two deep red-colored oils for an additional plate garnish, one meat-based and the other vegetarian. The first would have been made by steeping chorizo in warm olive oil and the other by doing the same thing with just pimentón, smoked paprika. In this way, I could garnish the plate to look the same for people who do not eat meat and people who eat meat, but just not pork.

And no doubt, for the second addition, the piquant bite of some micro-arugula would add a complementary color and taste. It's just that at home, I don't have flats of micro-arugula sitting on the counter awaiting my scissors. I do miss that about the restaurant: the ability to cut herbs and put them immediately on the plate before it was whisked off to the dining room.

I Cook Sablefish Skin Side Down

After the Skin is Crisp, Finishing the Fish

For the white bean purée, I wanted to go rustic, so not totally smooth. To do this, I cooked a bit of garlic in olive oil, then added cooked beans, and a touch of pimentón. The beans cooked for a few minutes with the addition of some water and then using the back of my wooden spoon, I mashed them roughly, adding water and salt as necessary.

White Beans Cooking, Before Mashing

Pimentón is one of the great contributions of Spain to the culinary world. When I say pimentón, I don't mean just any smoked paprika, but the famous name-protected Pimentón de La Vera from Spain. There really is no substitute for it, and while it is expensive relative to other ground peppers, a little pimentón can go a long way. Often I have tasted dishes in which the cook has been heavy-handed with the pimentón and the dish has become a bit acrid, bitter, and overly smoky.

Pimentón is available in dulce (sweet), agridulce (bittersweet), and picante (hot). I have always bought the agridulce version as it seems most versatile to me. If I want the dish to be picante, I have lots of other weapons in my aresenal to add to the pimentón. From having been smoked over oak, the pimentón adds both a smoky flavor and a haunting smoky aroma to any dish to which it is added.

I use it often to build richness and a sense of meatiness into vegan and vegetarian dishes. In fact, a woman who was eating a vegan diet excoriated me in my dining room and in a subsequent on-line review. She insisted mistakenly that I had added bacon to her dish that contained only pimentón. She refused to eat the dish that I had gone out of my way to prepare for her. But such is the power of pimentón to convince people that a dish contains meat when in fact, it does not. For that, I love pimentón and will always have it in my spice cabinet.

Piquillo Salad

I have talked previously about the need for something acidic to complement the super rich and fatty sablefish. This is the role that the piquillo salad plays for this dish. More specifically, it is the sherry vinegar that helps cut the richness. The salad is utterly trivial: sliced piquillos, a touch of minced garlic, salt to taste, and a sprinkle of Sherry vinegar to taste.

Piquillos are another of the great gifts of Spain to the world. Their inimitable flavor, both sweet and rich at the same time, is a true joy. They are best served simply so that they can take their starring role at the table.

This was a wonderful way to experience an awesome piece of sablefish. Besides having beautiful flavors that complemented each other tremendously well, the dish took no more than 15 minutes to execute! This is my kind of dish.