For the low-fat minded, here is one that can be made without a drop of added oil or fat.
6-8 oz fish portions seasoned with salt, ginger powder, and soy sauce
kimchi sauce (fermented napa cabbage, you’ve tried it, right?)
3-4 bunches of bok choy, about 6-8 leaves per bunch
Vacuum seal the fish, cook in water bath at 131F for 20 minutes.
Sautee’ the kimchee to just start the caramelization process. You can skip this step if you want and make a more raw sauce. Or you can eliminate the sauce altogether.
Blanch the bok choy in a big pot of boiling, salted water until at the peak of green-ness. Shock in ice water bath to stop it from cooking and let it drain dry. Finish with coarse salt and orange zest.
Putting the kimchi sauce together
Aside from the texture of the fish, this can be the most unique part of this dish. Here’s where I’d use a bit of fat. If you look closely at my sauce, you can see that it’s not a tight emulsion. In the spirit of demonstrating I could eliminate fat from it and still make it good, I skimped on the oil. But that’s what it needed more of to make it into a better looking sauce.
1 cup of kimchi
1/2 cup of fresh squeezed orange juice
2 tablespoons of sriracha
salt to taste
neutral oil (don’t splurge your good quality olive oil here, you won’t be able to taste it)
Sautee’ the kimchi in a skillet on high heat until it starts to brown. It’s high liquid content will cause it to take a while to do this. Stay with it.
Put into your blender with the other ingredients (except oil) and mix on high. Add the oil, a few drops at first, and continue adding until you get the consistency you want. Taste for heat/salt and adjust accordingly.
Just like salad dressing, mayonnaise, etc, it’s putting together a liquid and fat that normally wouldn’t mix. The liquid in this case was the kimchi, along with a little orange juice, and sriracha hot sauce for kick, salt to taste.
**Notes
The fish does have a bit of extruded albumin which indicates it might have been cooked at too high a temperature. The next time around I’ll probably do it at 129 instead of 131. You laugh, but those couple of degrees may be all it takes to not have that white/tan stuff on the fish. Or if you don’t care, leave it as is.
On sous vide fish: if you’re not used to it, it takes a little bit of adjustment. I think most of us are used to overcooked fish, and just deal with it.
When you do it sous vide, there are a couple of things to remember: the fish has to be high quality and can’t be “fishy”. The vacuum sealing will concentrate all the aromatics, so if it’s off, it’ll just make it worse. The second is you technically don’t need much fat for fish that are high in natural oils and omega-3.
