Asturian-Style Fish with Chocolate Sauce
Ingredients
2 servings
For the fish in sauce
- Sea bass 1
- Onion 1
- Button mushrooms 100 g
- Butter 50 g
- Flour 1 tbsp (10 g)
- White chocolate 50 g
- Dry white wine 100 ml
- Boiling water 0.5 cup (100 ml)
- Ground cinnamon a pinch
- Cloves 1-2 buds
- Salt, black pepper to taste
For the side dish
- Brown rice 1 cup (180 g)
- Water for the rice 2 cups (400 ml)
- Butter for the rice 1 tbsp
- Salt to taste
Step-by-step recipe
Preparing the fish
The nice thing about cooking sea fish is that you don’t have to catch it. You don’t have to get up early, drive somewhere, fish, and explain why nothing is biting. You simply buy the sea bass at the store. It is sold as headless carcasses, usually deep-frozen. By the way, a large river perch is also very good cooked this way, if you caught one.
Thaw the bass and clean it, first of all scaling it. Sea bass scales are large and come off easily with an ordinary knife.
River perch is much harder. It has armor instead of scales. Sometimes it is easier to cut the fillet off together with the skin than to scale the fish.
Cut the fillets and portion them. Cut the fillets from the scaled fish and remove the bones if possible. Though, to be honest, the bones of a bass are large, barely noticeable in the finished dish and easy to remove. Cut each fillet into four portions, season with salt and pepper and leave for 15 mins.
Chocolate sauce
Fry the onion with flour. In a deep saucepan, melt the butter (50 g) and fry the finely chopped onion over medium heat until soft. When the onion is cooked, sprinkle with 1 tbsp of flour (10 g), stir well and keep cooking, stirring constantly, until the onion and flour turn into a uniform mass, about 4-5 mins. It is important that there are no lumps.
Add the white chocolate. Grate the white chocolate on the finest grater, preferably an unsweetened one if you can find it, add it to the saucepan and stir well. The chocolate melts almost instantly and blends into the sauce.
Long ago I didn’t even know there was chocolate that wasn’t dark. Our ideals were the “Chaika” and “Alenushka” bars and small chocolates with an airplane or a steam train on the wrapper. Though I do remember some almost white substance called cocoa butter. Now you can buy white chocolate anywhere.
Add the spices, wine and water and simmer the sauce for 15 mins. Add a pinch of ground cinnamon and 1-2 cloves ground to dust. Pour in the dry white wine and half a cup of boiling water (100 ml). Stir well and cook the sauce for 15 mins over the lowest heat you can manage, stirring occasionally. Ideally the sauce doesn’t even boil but just barely simmers, with air bubbles rising to the surface as rarely as possible.
Fish in sauce and rice
Stew the fish in the sauce, covered. Put the fish pieces into the hot chocolate sauce, simply submerging them, and stew, covered, over the lowest heat for 12-15 mins.
Turn the fish, add the mushrooms and stew for another 15 mins. Carefully turn the fish over, add the mushrooms, cover the saucepan and stew for another 15 mins, until the fish turns opaque and flakes easily with a fork.
There is no need to stir the fish: the sauce is quite thin, and the fish cooks evenly.
Boil the rice. While the fish is cooking, boil the brown rice in salted water: for 1 cup of rice (180 g), 2 cups of water (400 ml) and 1 tbsp of butter. Cook, covered, over low heat until the rice absorbs all the water. This rice takes longer to cook than regular rice. It is important that the rice is fluffy.
Serving
Put the rice on plates, top with the fish and pour the chocolate and mushroom sauce over it.
Fish with chocolate is served hot only. The dish is incredibly tasty and unusual, and the sweet chocolate doesn’t spoil the flavor. Fish with chocolate goes wonderfully with a glass of white wine.
Calories and macros
825 kcal
Serving ≈ 540 g
- Protein26 g13% of kcal
- Fat38 g43% of kcal
- Carbs90 g44% of kcal
100 g154 kcalProtein 4.9 gFat 7.2 gCarbs 16.8 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.