Mike van de Elzen: Flounder with burnt butter, capers and parsley

Flounder with burnt butter, capers and parsley

Cook time: 10 minutes

Prep time: 10 minutes

Serves: 6

12 flounder fillets  

1 cup seasoned plain flour with salt and white pepper  

4 tbsp sunflower oil  

100 gm unsalted butter, cut into small cubes  

2 lemons  

4 tbsp capers  

1/2 cup Italian parsley, chopped roughly

Flaky salt and cracked pepper

1 dried chilli, crushed

Heat two cast-iron pans over a low heat, before adding in the sunflower oil.  

Run the flounder fillets through the seasoned flour. Carefully place into the heated pan and cook until lightly coloured on one side before turning.  

Once you have flipped the fish, divide the butter into each pan and continue to cook, spooning the butter over the fish. This is a very fast process as you don't want to over cook the thin fillet.  

Once cooked, carefully remove the fish onto a preheated platter.  

Return the pan back to the heat and turn the heat up until the butter is becomes a rich golden brown. Add in the capers, parsley and chilli. Turn the pan off before squeezing the juice of the lemon to stop the butter from over cooking. Season with salt and a crack of pepper.  

Spoon the butter over the top of the fillets. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News talks'b Mike.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Vander Alson, our resident chef joins us now.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Good morning, Good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
We're talking fish, and I'm trying to think about the
last time I purchased fish to cook, and I cannot
recall when it was. And it's purely just a price thing.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
It's getting really expensive, like salmon. What's going on with salmon?
Someone told me the other day they paid one hundred
dollars a kilo for salmon.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
I hope it was really good salmon.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Oh, have to be.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I love fish, and I think it's something that we
can cook, so you know, you can make it taste
so delicious, but very easily and very quickly, can't you.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, fish is delicious. And what made me think of
this of doing this particular dishes? You say, we had
a fish smoke fire class, and you fillered a round
fish and then you fillowed the flatfishion. So that flatfish
is a flounder. And quite often we will buy a
flounder and we'll cook it whole, but to fill it
it is actually it's a little bit of a process.

(01:14):
So maybe I ask your fishmonger to do it for you.
You get two filets off the top, and then you
flip it over and you get two filets off the
bottom and with the flounder bean, So I guess narrow
the filets are quite small. However, flounder filets are delicious,
and flounder themselves are actually reasonably affordable when you put

(01:37):
them up against other fish.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, no, that's true. I was just recalling. I used
to get all my fish from my neighbor Paul. And
Paul used to go fishing and bring me beautiful big
snapper filets, and you know, like you, he wouldn't give
me the fish, he'd actually filled it for me and
give it all. It's just perfect. And then Paul moved away.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Which is a real show bug up.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
But I was just thinking I might a better reach
out to Paul, see how he is, see if he's
still fishing. So flounder is going to be our fish
of Troy. Say, we're going to put it with some
burnt butter capers and parsley.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
It's pretty classical, and it's kind of a dish that
works really well. As we're kind of running in towards
the end of summer because it's reasonably light. But what
the burnt butter does is it enriches it, so you
need flounder fillts. You could potentially do this with the
whole flounder, where you just bake the flounder off and
then you could do the butter sauce and pop that
over the top just before you serve it. But if

(02:31):
you've got filets, this is really really quick. So I've
got twelve flounder filets, so that's going to be four fillips's,
three flounder heat, two cast iron pans. We're going to
do all of these filets at the same time, so
you want to fear amount of heat into these cast
iron pans. Take your flounder filets, run them through a
seasoned flower. So season flower is basically plaine flower that's

(02:55):
just been seasoned with a little bit of salt and
maybe some white pepper. I wouldn't go crack pepper because
you don't want those dark fragments of the pepper running
through it. So run your flounder filets through there, and
then into your pans. You go four tablespoons of some
flour oil and then add in your filets. Run the
filets through the flour and then into the pan, color
them lightly before you turn them. At this point you

(03:17):
need to have one hundred grams of unsalted butter cut
into little cubes ready to go, two lemons that you've
cut in half. Four tablespoons are capers, and then half
a cup of Italian flat leaf parsley that you've roughly chopped.
When you flip over your flounder fillips. Because they are
so small and so skinny, these guys cook in about

(03:37):
ten seconds, so as soon as you flip them, in
goes the butter. Keep cooking that on a high heat
until the butter starts to color, and that's what we
call burnt butter, or what we classically call burn or zet.
As soon as you reach that lovely brown color, straight
in goes the lemons. Turn your pan off the juice

(03:58):
of two lemons, so that takes the heat out of
the pan, stops the butter from continuing to color. Four
tablespoons are capers, and then the Italian parsi that goes straight,
and then you could potentially put the pants like into
the side spoon a little bit of that bur noisette
or the brown butter over the top of it and
then serve that flounder pretty much straight away. It's just
it's a lovely way to cook fish because what the

(04:20):
burd noisette does is it, Yes, it enrichs it, but
also that that that coloring of the butter gives you
that real, almost nutty flavor to the fish. And flounder
and bird nosette is a great marriage.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
For more from the Sunday Session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks there Be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.