Pan-Roasted White Sturgeon alla Piccata

We're lucky here in the Pacific Northwest to have White Sturgeon in both the Willamette and Columbia Rivers; they are pretty amazing gamefish. There are strict limits on fishing for sturgeon as it is a highly protected and regulated population. Small amounts of sturgeon make it into the market and every now and again, I buy a piece as I did this week. Sturgeon is a mild, meaty white fish that lends itself to pan roasting.

Pan-Roasted White Sturgeon alla Piccata

If you have ever broken down a prehistoric-looking sturgeon, you will know that they have really tough, leathery, and inedible skin. At the restaurant, I would remove the skin and the subcutaneous fat layer because people were paying big bucks for presentation, but at home, I prefer to leave the skin on. I think it helps keep the fish moist while cooking.

This 8-ounce portion is about one and a half inches thick, meaning that it is going to take a good long while to cook through. You do not want to cook a thick piece of fish solely on the range top where the surface in contact with the pan would be subject to serious overcooking by the time it was done to the center.

The procedure for a thick piece of fish is to to brown it well on the show side in the pan, flip it, and sear it for a moment, then finish it in the oven. I cooked this portion for about four minutes on medium heat to sear it without setting off my smoke detector, then flipped it for another minute and turned both sides to the pan just to slightly cook them. Then I put it in a hot oven (400F) for 8 minutes and it was just done through to the center.

Knowing when to take it out of the oven is, naturally, the trick to fish cookery. After cooking tens and tens of thousands of pieces of fish, I know instinctively how long a piece of fish will take to cook and which fish take longer and which fish take shorter time to become cooked. Sturgeon really wants to tense when it hits the heat, meaning that it is going to take a relatively long time to cook. In fact, one good way to know when such a fish is cooked is when it has relaxed and released the tension.

A rough guide is 10 minutes per inch of thickness for the fish to be done to the center (as opposed to, say, salmon, that you still want to be a bit less well done in the center or tuna that you just want to color on the sides). At an inch and a half, this piece would take roughly 15 minutes. I cooked it four on the show side, one on the skin side, and roasted it another 8, for a total of 14 minutes. It rested for two minutes while I finished the sauce and it was perfectly done.

Just before I put the fish in the oven, I splashed the pan with white wine and added a large spoon of capers and the juice of half a lemon. When the fish came out of the oven, the liquid was mostly evaporated. I removed the fish from the pan, deglazed the pan with a splash of water, and brought the sauce back down before spooning it over the fish.

And once again, I was reminded how delightful sturgeon is to eat and how lucky we are to have them as a natural resource.