Pan-Seared Barramundi with "Sauce Vièrge"

I'm a huge proponent of wild-caught local fish from well-managed fisheries, but out here in Oregon, our selection is quite limited in comparison to what I am used to on the East Coast, where we served many dozens of species at the restaurant. Out here, we have access to salmon, steelhead, rockfish, Pacific cod, albacore, sturgeon, sablefish, halibut, and not a whole lot else. Often I wish for a bit more diversity in the fish that we eat, so when I ran across some beautiful farmed barramundi, I snapped it up.

Every now and again at the restaurant, we could not get much in the way of local wild-caught fish because of a hurricane or nor'easter keeping the fleet in port. At such times, I had no choice but to buy farmed fish and farmed barramundi from Massachusetts was a great choice. It cooks (and has crowd appeal) just like any of the eastern firm white fish: striped bass, grouper, wreckfish, drum, corvina, or snapper.

Ann, who I do not believe had ever eaten barramundi, asked me to grill it, but I knew from working with the fish for many years that one of the best things about it is the crispy skin that you can get from cooking it in a steel or cast iron pan. And so I crisped the portions and served them with a sauce that I call sauce vièrge.

Pan-Seared Barramundi with "Sauce Vièrge"

"Sauce Vièrge"

When I was learning my chops in the 1980s, one of the most influential chefs was Michel Guérard, who was arguably the father of nouvelle cuisine, the more modern take-off of haute cuisine with an emphasis on lighter saucing, brighter flavors, and beautiful presentations. Chef Guérard recorded a lot of his dishes in a book called Cuisine Minceur, so-called slimming cuisine. While some of the dishes seemed to me to be a bit too austere in pursuit of diet consciousness, I did read and learn.

One of preparations for which he became well known among chefs was a sauce that he called virgin sauce, sauce vièrge, virgin in the sense of uncooked and raw. It is essentially finely chopped tomatoes in a vinaigrette. I took the sauce and adopted it to my kitchen and served it with seafood during late summer when the necessary ingredients were in the market.

My version is more or less a chopped salad meets vinaigrette. Last night's version included red pepper, yellow pepper, cucumber, tomato, minced shallot, capers, olive oil, and lemon juice. I generally include either basil or parsley, but the winter has not been kind to my parsley and of course, the basil is long dead.

So, while the execution of the sauce is all mine, I freely admit that I stole the base idea from Michel Guérard. That theft is in the chef world one of the highest forms of flattery: something that one chef does is so good that other chefs take that idea and adapt it to their kitchens. I'd like to think that one of more of my sous chefs and other cooks might have taken some of my ideas into their own kitchens.