To make bouillabaisse, you need several varieties of fish, potatoes and “rouille” sauce.
Our recipe originated from reading cookbooks, visiting restaurants in Marseilles and the area and houses of friends, and our own experiments. Astrakhan, Arkhangelsk and, of course, Siberia also influenced our version of the soup.
Absolutely critical for this dish is the presence of fresh and varied fish. Mandatory are – Saint-Pierre, Chapon, Rascasse, Vive, Conger, Daurade, Merlan, Galinette. Seafood is often added – squid, shrimp, crabs, langusin, but their mass should not exceed more than 25 percent of the mass of all ingredients.
We cook bouillabaisse on an open fire in two stages.
- On the first day we cook broth from small fish, in the south of France, it is often called Poisson de Roche (rocky fish) and is sold in separate batches.
- Put the fish in cold water as a whole, add the onion, bay leaf, peppercorns, thyme and set on fire. The broth is prepared for 30-40 minutes to the moment when the fish boils over.
- Remove from the heat, discard the fish, filter the broth and put it overnight on the street or in the refrigerator in the hot season.
- Note that many specialists do not discard fish, but blend it, which gives a very thick, non-transparent broth.
On the second day, it is the turn of the big fish.
- We clean it of scales, take out the insides, put a pot of water with an onion, a bouquet of herbs on the fire. When the starts boiling, we add fish, potatoes and a few sprigs of rosemary.
- We bring the water to a boil, let it boil for a minute, then remove from the heat, wait for the boiling to stop and return to the fire. Depending on the fish and the power of the fire, we repeat this operation – set, wait for boiling, take off, wait for peace, put on fire – from five to ten times (until the fish is ready).
- Before the last operation, add a few spoons of pesto sauce, a pinch of salt, three crushed cloves of garlic, a pinch of thyme to the pot. Take out the fish and potatoes, put them on a separate dish.
There are several ways to serve the bouillabaisse.
- We start with broth in deep plates. Add rye (or white) croutons to the broth with the rouille sauce (the recipe is below). In Marseille, people also add grated Emmental.
- The second portion is the fish with potatoes in the broth (already without rouille), the ratio of solid to liquid – 2 to 1, in fact, the broth becomes a sauce for fish and potatoes.
- The third is fish without broth, which is taken from a dish into empty soup plates or into clean dinner plates.
To prepare the bouillabaisse, we use an old boiler with a capacity of X liters. Approximately one and a half kilograms of small fish go to the broth, for the bouillabaisse we use about three kilograms of large fish and five to six peeled potatoes.
The rouille sauce is made from olive oil (a cup), two egg yolks, four cloves of Provencal garlic, one chili pepper, a pinch of saffron and a pinch of salt.
Method:
- Peel the garlic, pass the cloves through a press.
- Grind peppers with a blender. Combine with garlic paste. Add salt and saffron.
- Separate the egg yolks from the whites and add them to the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Blend until the contents of the bowl are smooth.
- Continuing to blend, slowly pour in the oil, achieving homogeneity.
- Let the prepared sauce cool.
Bouillabaisse has a particular status in Marseille and surrounding areas, with many legends and stories associated with it. According to one of them, the name of the soup comes from the Provencal word bouiabaisso, or “reduce the boiling”. Fishermen brought the soup to a boil, removed it from the heat and boiled again.
In 1980, the Charter of Bouillabaisse (une charte de la Bouillabaisse) was adopted in Marseilles, which consolidated the basic principles of its preparation. Our recipe is fully consistent with them.
To finish, we can boast that we happened to try the biggest bouillabaisse in the world. Every two years in the port of Sanary-sur-Mer, local fishermen join forces to prepare it. We were at this event in 2016.
A crane periodically raised and lowered a steel tub over a giant bonfire in which hundreds of kilograms of fish and seafood were cooked. The wives and girlfriends of the fishermen served the bouillabaisse to three thousand holders of happy tickets sitting at the long tables.
First broth with croutons, and then cooked fish. There were no potatoes in the giant bouillabaisse, but there were squid, small crabs, mussels and other seafood. Light Provençal rose accompanied the wonderful soup. And the evening ended with a gigantic disco on the seashore, from which we fled, fearing the scale of a potential disaster.
