POV: Cooking Restaurant Quality Fish (How To Make it at Home)

Join Will as he guides you through the art of cooking seabass, paired with a rich and velvety brown butter sauce that’s sure to tantalize your taste buds.

In this video, you’ll witness the step-by-step process of creating a restaurant-worthy dish right in your own kitchen. Will’s expertise shines as he prepares and cooks fish to perfection, ensuring it’s tender, flaky, and bursting with flavor.

But the star of the show is undoubtedly the brown butter sauce. Will reveals the secrets behind achieving that nutty, golden perfection that elevates the seabass to a whole new level of deliciousness.

Whether you’re a seasoned home cook or just embarking on your culinary journey, this video is packed with valuable insights and practical tips that will help you master the art of cooking fish and crafting exquisite sauces.

Get ready to embark on a culinary adventure with Will as he shares his culinary wisdom and transforms seabass into a gourmet delight. Hit that play button and start cooking up a storm in your kitchen!

This is how to get the perfect crispy skin on your fish at home now the most important thing with fish is making sure that your hand is the right temperature so if it’s too cold your fish is going to stick if it’s too hot your skin is

Going to burn before the the rest of the flesh Cooks perfectly this is seab bass it’s got a beautiful skin typically this is actually what we call a round fish so that’s like salmon mullet got one Central bone that runs down the middle and they’ve also got rib bones as well

So we’ll get about four or five portions out of this fish just portion it neatly the belly bits are a little bit harder to cook you have to play and manipulate them a little bit around um because obviously that thin bit is going to cook very differently to that thick bit so when

You’re asking for it try or choosing your portions at the fish shop try and get something that’s nice and even uh because I can pretty much tell that is just going to cook so much more evenly than that in order to get a crispy skin what you

Want is you need the the meat to be thick enough for you to to be able to get a caramelization on that skin without the fish overcooking so if you go for a really thin tiny bit of fish it’s going to be really really difficult for you to get that perfect

Caramelization um and also get it cooked so try and get something with a good bit of uh weight to it so I’m going to show you a little technique here so this is just a normal cast iron pan and I’ve just put a little bit of fine salt in

There and I’m just going to bring it to the boil so if you can imagine if you cooked an omelette in there or any sort of eggs you it’ stick really aggressively to the base of that pan so principle with this is you can pretty much turn any pan into a non-stick pan

Just by heating up to a high point a little bit of salt uh yeah I absolutely recommend going to going to a fishmonger or a good supplier so look we see the salt’s just started to caramelize that’ll basically be ready now trick to getting your fish super super crispy is

Just take a clean cloth um we use microfibers in the restaurant just for fish get your skin super dry and you can leave it in the fridge I’ve actually seen people use a haird dryer on it before you leave it in the fridge like this and then you’ll get like a

Glass skin caramelize that salt and then just discard that you’re going to get a really nice non-stick layer now on this pan if you want to cook fish and you’ve not you don’t think you’ve got the best pan for it this is just to demonstrate basically

Any pan you’ve got is going to do as long as you got a bit of salt most people hopefully have a bit of salt to hand obviously that pan Now is really really hot so we’re just going to let it cool down a little bit but not way too

Much whilst we do that we’re just going to prepare what is a really simple sauce you always see people making a pan sauce after a steak but you can do it the same same way with uh with fish and it’s super super delicious because you’ve got

Brown butter in there we’re going to put a little bit of garlic a little bit of Caper a little bit of anvy so every single thing the want with fish is going to be in there just to give a really nice imami this is uh called traditionally I

Think it’s called something like an admiral sauce um so I believe it’s what they used to cook for the uh the chief hono on um on Naval vessels so lots of parsley the other thing that we’re going to use as well is a load of a load of

Really good quality Cherry vinegar um but if you can’t get Cherry vinegar you can use a a red wine vinegar or maybe a really nice balsamic probably work but you want the vinegar of sweetness just going to zest a little bit of lemon don’t forget the little nubbing at

The bottom importantly as well you’re only taking off the zest should still look yellow if you go too far and it looks white then you get a bitter NE it which is what you don’t want so let’s just microp PL a little bit of garlic all the me on plast as we

Say is ready for the sauce when we’re going to need it because the difference of steak and fish is is a lifetime really a second makes a massive difference with fish what I’m going to do with this fish fairly controversially I’m not going to season the skin I’m

Going to season the Flesh on most oily or predatory fish there’s a membrane on the outside of the fish so you’ve got to basically get high enough heat so the membrane um renders out but not too high and cause the whole fish to stick or

Come off the uh the flesh we’ve got our seasoned fish what we’re going to do is just lay into the hot pan and apply a good amount of pressure the outside of the f fish sticks to the pan and then the membrane is rendered down by the

Heat and by just putting this a little bit of pressure it stops that skin from snapping back straight away you’ll feel it in about 10 10 seconds the fish is going to relax and that’s that membrane breaking and then what you’re going to do is you’re going to take it off and

You’re going to allow it to sit for just a little bit of time and then you’ve got a foolproof way to get crispy skin and I’m just going to gently peel off the skin and you will need to assist it a little bit maybe so that is how I know

That’s going to be a banging bit of fish so now you can actually work the opposite get your pan nice and hot get a good bit of oil in there now lay away from you and again just apply a little bit of pressure I started it high that’s the skin making contact with

The OB like right okay no stick definitely not going to be suck now at all but then I’m going to reduce the heat now what we want now is it is quite a critical way because you want to get that Perfect Skin with no patches on

It but the fish is going to cook s super quickly we can already see the outsides of the fish going white around here and the internal serving temperature of this fish we want about probably about 44° you see it’s perfectly uh pliable no stick whatsoever and I’ve

Just agitated it so it was laying this way and now I’ve just turned it that way so now I know that any of those little dots or any little patches that won’t hit the first way on the pan are going to be hit the second way butter as we

Know is a really good way to reduce the heat in the pan oh look at that so so crispy already right so I can see it’s getting nice and golden brown I’m actually just going to take that off the heat we’ve already got the crispy skin

But now what we want is that that flesh to cook perfectly at the same time and Seabass is a funny one it’ll it’ll be you’ll probe this now it’ll be on you know 8° flip it over you let it rest for a second under the hot lights and it’ll be

Overcooked it’s probably one of the trickiest fish to cook so what we’ve got now we can see we’ve got almost a perfect gradient of it being 85% of the way cooked little bit of butter and this is going to be the foundation for the sauce as well give it a really

Gentle base on top so we’re just using that melted butter to almost comy the top you know it’s not intense but also the butter is gets to a high enough temperature to keep that skin nice and crispy which is what we really want so last stage let’s just finish off that crispy crispy

Skin can feel it it’s just super super super crispy the all way across that’s exactly what you want fish out butter slightly higher add little one little knob in we want this to be basically a golden brown so they call it nut butter we’re actually going to take

It a little bit further than nut brown so this is this is a seasoning I’ve not added any salt to that pan so roughly chopped nice big chunks of anery you’ll pass nut butter and you’re into ground butter or burnt butter territory so turn the pan off the rest of the sauce is

Going to happen off the heat so anues go in tiny bit of the Caper brine goes in with a couple of the Capers few Capers as well so that brine’s just going to bring the temperature down before we add the garlic garlic goes in finish with lemon juice T of cherry

Vinegar in with our parsley and then this wants to be served really nice and warm and really nice and freshh skin is still really really crispy light drizzle on top but not too much cuz you don’t want to affect the crispiness of the skin there we go super simple fish dish

Making sure you got the crispier skin and a really nice acidic burnt butter sauce as well and it’s just this beautiful translucent texture when you perfectly cooked fish should never be stringy or tough or dry right it should be super m