Florida Fish of the Week

We are spending the winter months in Ft Myers, the city of palms and grouper sandwiches. There is a fishmonger shack/stand down the street. After talking about how we should get more fresh fish into our eating, we stopped by and came back with a thick filet of Tripletail. Unfamiliar with the fish, but looked it up: the fish is not “pretty”; it can get quite large - up to 40 inches and 40 lbs. ; the taste is described as similar to grouper or snapper.
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I prepared the fish by slightly modifying a recipe from a video that I found online that pan roasted it and served with a lemon butter sauce. I Lowry-seasoned the filet, coated both sides in Lowry-seasoned flour, pan seared one side in olive oil and butter, flipped and finished in a 350 Fahrenheit oven for about 14-15 minutes (it was a THICK filet!). I simplified the lemon butter sauce to have less butter and seasoned with salt and pepper.
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The fish was served with a spinach salad, and a side of locally made mild salsa. I pulled a white CDR Villages ‘Laudun’ from the chilled bottles that were in the refrigerator door. Not a firm fish, not like a cod or halibut, but delicious eating. It did remind me of grouper. The wine was also very nice: dry, aromatic, softly flavorful. A good companion. Simple pleasures.
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Thanks, Jim. I think we all have a duty to eat sustainable off-menu fish. They’re hard to find here in Chicago

Very nice, did they have a bunch of different lesser-known fish available?

That was awesome! I look forward to the rest of your winter!!!

Very cool idea - purposefully trying new fish. I’m looking forward to following this.

The only time I’ve had that fish is at a restaurant in your neck of the woods. It was delicious. I would definitely buy it if I could find it.

I have had that fish in Aruba a few times as a special of the day. It’s very good.

Triple tail is good, your preparation looks delicious.
If they have it you may want to try the lion fish.
Not only is it tasty but consuming it is a great way to help control it, as it is an invasive predator fish.

Please eat as much lion fish as possible…

TIA,

George

And Asian carp

This week’s chalk board at the fish shack was headed by Florida Keys shrimp and black grouper, but we opted for the yellowtail snapper listed third. This is a fish that I have actually caught in undersized versions fishing from the shore on Sanibel, but never have eaten. There are several versions of “snappers” down here. The yellowtail can get up to about 30 inches and several pounds or so. It is described as good to excellent eating.
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The flesh of the yellowtail snapper seemed a little coarser grained than last week’s tripletail, but still nice looking filets. I chose a simple preparation, since dinner was going to compete with NFL playoff watching. I found a recipe for crumb coated red snapper online and slightly modified it with the yellowtail. The filet was coated in a mixture of bread crumbs and parmesan. I did an egg wash before coating and also put some Lawry’s salt in the coating mixture. Pan fried the coated filet in a little olive oil on medium heat for about 4 minutes on each side.
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The fish was served with a baked potatoes and onions dish and peas. I chose the chilled NY Riesling from the refrigerator door. (2017 HJ Wiemer Dry Riesling which was recommended by several posters in a recent thread “Favorite Riesling from USA”.)
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I had no grated parmesan and decided to substitute some “finely shredded”. Probably not a good move, as the heavier filet stuck to the pan and lost most of the coating. The smaller filet fared well. Tasty simple fresh fish, but not up to the tripletail last week but that was prepared differently and served with a lemon butter sauce. Not the same quality preparation. (Hey, I am watching the NFL Playoffs!).
The Riesling was nice: almost a slippery mouth-feel, oily lemon and other fruit/herbs, light and dancing, dry, enjoyable to drink with the meal and alone, plus my wife’s approval = a keeper. We ate well tonight!

Love that fish

Caught a big beautiful yellow tail in Belize. Brought it back to the resort and the chef prepared it multiple ways. It was really great.

George

Had blackened sheepshead fish at a joint just north of Daytona last week. Tasty, but look at those choppers.

George, even the undersized yellowtail that I have caught on light tackle will take runs that make the drag scream. Catching a large one must have been very cool! -Jim

John, agreed the top front teeth are eerily human-like. We caught a few last week in the backwaters and I told my fishing partner that the bottom teeth reminded me of corn on the cob. -Jim

Great thread!

I don;t know if Yellow Tail is considered sustainable, but as a scuba diver I can say that I have seen zillions of them and often in large schools. I’m a little more concerned about grouper because they seem to have been much more plentiful when I started diving 30 years ago.

When I visited my neighborhood fishmonger(ess) this week, there were no other customers waiting, and I did my best “friendly” by asking her how she was doing. . . . . . Ten minutes later we got around to talking about possibilities for this week’s fish. I settled on a shellfish - Key West Pink Shrimp, aka “Pinks”. They are named such because they are already pink-ish in the raw state, unlike a lot of shrimp that start white-ish and turn pink with cooking.
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I was thinking lemon and garlic, maybe scampi, so I asked for a pound of Medium. They only had Jumbo and Xtra-Jumbo left, so Jumbo it was.
Because of the size of these shrimp, and for a couple of additional reasons, I thought of preparing baked stuffed shrimp instead. It was a dish that my wife would always order when we first started dating and I took her to the only restaurant I knew (age 21). Also, I kind of half-assed my fish of the week preparation last week while trying to watch the NFL playoffs, so I felt I owed her (and myself) a better effort this week. However, after perusing a few baked stuff shrimp recipes online, I slipped back into a “scampi state of mind”.
I pieced together a few slightly different online recipes for lemon-garlic shrimp or shrimp scampi, rolled up the sleeves of my t-shirt, and got down to preparation. I shelled and de-veined the shrimp and marinated them in a mixture of olive oil, salt and McCormack’s “Perfect Pinch” garlic and herbs seasoning and put in the refrigerator for about an hour.
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The shrimp were first par-cooked in olive oil, set aside, and then finished in a sauce made from the leftover olive oil, crushed garlic, fresh lemon juice, white wine and unsalted butter.
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Served over angel hair pasta with a toasted ciabatta roll on the side to soak up the sauce.
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I opened a Kirkland Signature 2016 Chablis that we picked up at Costco this week to keep me company while prepping and cooking and to serve with our meal. I like this wine very much; it is my style of Chardonnay, lemony crisp, flavorful, no detectable oak (to me), almost like a Chardonnay-Sancerre if that makes sense to anyone. Very enjoyable on its own and with the scampi!
The shrimp were the best shrimp I have ever had in my life and my wife agreed: fresh sweet succulence, flavored with garlic, lemon, butter and seasoning, perfectly cooked, DELICIOUS!
This was some effort for me to pull this together, but totally worth it . . . UNTIL my wife suggested strongly (and without a trace of a smile) that it wasn’t “fair” if I did not also do cleanup. Sometimes, just when you think you have done something pretty good . . . you haven’t. Such is (partnered) life sometimes!

Oh man, love this thread…I usually spend a decent amount of time fishing in FL during my annual trip on the gulf side and love all the seafood options – Jim, those shrimp look delicious, as does everything else!

(btw, nice last name! :slight_smile: )