An easy roasted whole red snapper recipe with Mediterranean flavors
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The fish stared back at me, eyes wide and shining, fins limp and wet. Still half-wrapped in paper, its gut hollow, it was the first whole fish I’d brought home to cook, and it forced me to reckon not just with dinner, but with life and death.
“Culturally, we’re not a country that spends a lot of time eating whole fish. We’re not conditioned to do it; we’re a fillet-eating society,” chef Ricky Moore, of the Durham, N.C., Saltbox Seafood Joint, told me by phone. “Most places abroad, eating whole fish is standard, it's normal.”
“Growing up, we didn’t eat fillet fish,” Moore said, noting that he comes from “a long line of fisherfolk.”
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“Our philosophy was, fisherfolk don’t catch fillets, we catch whole fish.” So, cooking whole fish is a more obvious approach in Moore’s mind. “I think it’s the most natural way to celebrate good fish, personally, from a preparation standpoint, and a textural standpoint,” he said.
Between grocery store rotisseries and home-cooked birds, we roast a lot of chicken in the United States, but processors cut their heads off so we don’t have to look them in the face. There’s an intimacy in looking into another’s eyes, doubly so when its death means it’s crossed over from fellow animal to food. For a lot of human existence, this feeling was described in terms of dominion or disgust. For the past couple of decades, I’ve tried to approach it with humility.
End of carouselIf you eat fish, but you’ve never cooked one whole, tonight might be the night to give it a go. Whole fish are often less expensive than fillets, and roasting one is at least as easy as roasting a chicken or large cut of meat.
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“Simplicity is the key,” Moore advised. First, have your fishmonger clean it, descale it and trim the sharp fins. At home, bring it to cool room temperature, season it, stuff the cavity, and get ready to cook it at high heat, somewhere between 375 and 450 degrees. The trickiest part is knowing when it’s done.
How to tell when it will be buttery, not dry? “Checking for the degree of doneness is universal,” Moore said. “Find one of the dorsal fins. If it pulls out easily, then the fish is done.” As with all proteins that are cooked bone-in, there will be some carry-over cooking, so you’ll want to consider resting time, too.
This recipe calls for a whole bass or snapper, which gets seasoned, stuffed and roasted on top of zucchini or carrots for a sheet pan meal. Once out of the oven, you’ll drizzle the fish with pomegranate molasses, a sweet-and-tangy slip of a sauce that gives even the mildest fish lots of flavor. (Look for it near the honey in your supermarket, or at Middle Eastern or Indian grocers.) A sprinkle of pistachios adds a finishing touch of crunch.
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Of course, you can get a whole fish without its head — any fishmonger will gladly chop it off — but if I’m buying a fish to cook whole, I wouldn’t want to: I want to look into its eyes, see their clear sheen. Especially if I didn’t catch the fish myself, that’s proof that it was swimming not too many hours before, proof that it’s going to smell and taste like the clean, salty sea.
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