Classic Fish Meunière

Date Completed: 4/4/2022

Last year on our trip to Chicago, Garrett and I had dinner at a steakhouse across the street from our hotel. We’d just tried a Michelin star restaurant the night before (where I had spilled balsamic glaze on my dress… yay) so I was craving something inside my comfort zone. We both enjoyed their excellent takes on classics like caesar salad, filet mignon, mashed potatoes, a vegetable for me, and dessert to go.

All that backstory to say that a group sitting at the table next to us ordered the special, Sole Meunière. They deboned the fish tableside in quite a spectacle. We were quite intrigued. In Garrett’s words “it looked so cool.” He eventually tried it at a restaurant back home and had been wanting to make it himself ever since.

We found a recipe in the Seafood chapter of America’s Test Kitchen Cooking School Cookbook. Instead of sole we used tilapia. Close enough!

This was a recipe that seemed to require all the prep to be finished before starting the process. The prep was really just chopping some parsley, juicing a lemon, and seasoning the fish with salt and pepper. Easy!

Doing all this ahead let us set up a station approach which worked very efficiently!

The recipe has you salt and pepper the fish several minutes before you begin to dredge it in flour. ATK explained this method allows moisture from the fish to be drawn to the surface. This gives the flour something to stick to.

Garrett handled the dredging and meticulously ensured the flour evenly coated the fish.

Here’s an over-the-top part. This recipe calls for warm plates!

Technically, the recipe includes this instruction because it yields four pieces of fish that are cooked in two batches. We halved the recipe, but still did the step for fun!

In a nonstick skillet, we heated canola oil over high heat until shimmering. Then we added a little bit of butter for flavor and placed the fish in the skillet. The high heat helped get a nice sear on the first side. Garrett was quite proud of the sear on this! We reduced the heat slightly for even cooking.

We cooked the fish for about 5 minutes total: 3 minutes on the first side and 2 on the second.

Here’s Garrett transferring the fish from the skillet to the plate. We let the filets sit on their warm plates in the oven while we finished everything up!

It couldn’t have been easier to make! I browned two tablespoons of butter in a standard skillet. Nonstick doesn’t work for browning butter because you need the shinier surface to be able to see the butter’s color changing.

Once you smell the classic brown butter aroma and see the little brown bits, remove it from the heat and pour in the juice from half a lemon. This is also when you season with salt to taste.

To plate the meal, we removed the fish from the oven and sprinkled it (artfully) with chopped parsley. Then we spooned plenty of the lemon butter sauce over the top and garnished with a wedge of lemon.

Beautiful!

Taste Report:

I’m slowly overcoming my fear of fish dishes, and this one helped a lot! Decadent! The flaky white fish had a delicate and crisp crust from the flour dredge. An extra squeeze of lemon right before eating made it so bright while the butter sauce offered plenty of indulgence.

If you read my last post about Lemon Meringue Pie, you know that I’m not a big fan of lemon flavor in dessert. However, I am a huge fan of lemon in savory dishes. This brown butter lemon sauce took our fish dish to the next level. It even made our simple asparagus side dish extra delicious.

And I have to give a nod to eating off of warm plates. How fun and fancy! It really did seem to keep the food warm a bit longer than usual.

Mess Report:

Here’s another view of our workstation after the fact. Overall there weren’t too many dishes! Just a bit of an explosion on the island to work around.

All worth it for this extra yummy dinner!

And there we have it - lemon back in my good graces and a Seafood chapter completed!