But we ate the most delicious Mediterranean-style fish on March 20, 2011 in a traditional restaurant overlooking the Adriatic Sea in Croatian Rowena.
They also served shells in white sauce and lobster, but the cooked rascasse (chapon in Marseille) remained unrivaled. We were so overwhelmed by it in the literal and figurative sense that we fell on the lawn hundreds of steps from the restaurant and didn’t come to our senses for a long time, admiring the turquoise sea.
Since then, we regularly cook Mediterranean-style fish. Almost always it turns out good, sometimes tasty and beautiful, but there are also failures – a capricious recipe, especially if you don’t make it every day as it is done in restaurants. And yet…
Our favorite fish for this dish is chapon. You can use another Mediterranean fish – sarah, sea wolf, gilthead, sea bass. Since the thickness of these representatives of the underwater world is different, you need to be very careful about the duration of the preparation.
Mediterranean fish consists of two elements – the fish itself and a side dish of vegetables and root vegetables, which are baked together.
For the garnish, we always use potatoes, tomatoes, onions. Depending on the mood and the availability of products, we can add pepper, zucchini, fennel, carrots.
We start by preparing the side dish.
- Peeled potatoes, onions and tomatoes are cut into round slices of medium thickness, in case other ingredients are used, they are cut in pieces of similar size.
- Put the vegetables in an open clay dish, add pepper, dried thyme, pepper, a few freshly cut sprigs of rosemary, a few spoons of olive oil.
- Put the dishes with vegetables in an oven heated to 200 degrees for 30 minutes. Gently mix the vegetables several times. Salt, pepper and put olive oil on the fish, cleared of scales and viscera, put a few sprigs of rosemary in its stomach.
- Open the oven and put the fish on top of the vegetables. It is important that the fish does not fall to the side.
- Reduce the temperature to 180 degrees. Leave the fish in the oven for about twenty minutes.
- Take it out, demonstrate it to those who will eat it, let it cool a little, split it and serve it.
The best combination is with White Bandol, for example, the Chateau Salette.