Mike van de Elzen: Snapper with panzanella salad

Crispy snapper with panzanella salad 

Cook time: 5 minutes 

Prep time: 10 minutes 

Serves: 4

4-6 fillets of skin on snapper 

Sunflower oil  

Flaky sea salt 

Panzanella 

1/2 ciabatta loaf 

Additional olive oil 

Flaky sea salt 

3 tbsp olive oil 

3 tbsp red wine vinegar 

1 tsp brown sugar 

Salt, to taste 

1 tsp Dijion mustard 

Pepper, to taste 

8 small tomatoes, quartered 

1/2 cup  kalamata olives 

1 cup char grilled peppers, sliced 

Handful of Italian parsley, chopped 

Tear the ciabatta loaf into large irregular pieces, drizzle with a little olive oil and salt. Preheat your cast iron pan before frying the bread until golden and crispy. It needs to be crispy but still somewhat chewy. 

In a large bowl whisk together the olive oil, red wine vinegar, sugar and a little salt and pepper to taste.   

Preheat a cast iron pan. 

Portion your snapper into usable pieces, coat well with oil and season with salt.  

Place the snapper into the clean hot pan skin side down and firmly press down the flesh for 5 seconds, preventing the fillet from curling. Continue to cook on high until the fillet has almost turn completely white. Flip over for the a final few seconds. 

Once ready to serve, add in the bread, tomatoes, olives, peppers and parsley.  

Spoon over the dressing to wet the crispy bread and serve as serve as possible onto platters with the crispy snapper. 

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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 Right.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Mike Vander Ellison is with us.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
Now, good morning, good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
This sounds what have I said this correctly? Pans and
Ella perfect, pans and ALUs had a crispy snapper with
pans and ola sada. It sounds great.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Well, it did sound great when I was writing this
recipe on Friday and sun was bursting through it. It
was nice and off and wonderful. Now it's a little
drop happened to our suber where we are.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
It's a little drusy. Oh no, to be honest with you,
my cucumbers desperately needed this water. I am very very
relaxed about a day rain.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Bring it on.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Yeah, absolutely, the panics needed as well. So yeah, but
pans and now I've actually I was thinking because during
the week we had a couple of classes here and
we made pans and nowa on both of the classes,
and I was thinking back to when I first made it,
and it was my days in London. I was working
at a restaurant called Bluebird on Kings Road and Chelsea.
My head chef was a chef called John t Road

(01:09):
and he introduced me to this pans and olus out
of it, and ever since then, I just love it.
At this time of the year when your tomatoes are
just starting to come out and the lovely and the
sweet and the bursting full of flavor, so panzanella is
the way to go. So what is pans now? It's
a classic Tuscan salad, bursting with those fresh tomatoes, heaps

(01:31):
a fresh basil which is starting to come out now
as well, crispy chabata which you've toasted up, and heaps
of olive oar. I don't use a lot of extraversion
olive all in my cooking. I'm generally a sunflower or
grapes in all sort of guy. But this flavor, or
the subtle bitterness of the olive oil really elevates this
dish and makes the panzanella kind of stand up. So

(01:53):
super simple to make, and the crispy snapper that we're
serving with us. This could be chicken, this could be lamb,
this could be beef. You can serve the salad with
anything you want, so start by. I've got this will
feed maybe four to six people half a life of
cher barta, so cheer barter just because it's crispy and
it's crunchy and it kind of tears, but that could

(02:14):
be sourdough. It could potentially be some for caupture. Take that,
rip it into irregular pieces, drizzle some olive oil over
the top, put some salt onto it, heat upper cast
iron pan, throw in your bread, and then just fry
it until it's golden and crispy. Alternatively, you could just
spread it out onto an oven tray fired into an

(02:34):
oven and cook it until it's just under You still
want it to be somewhat chewing, so once that's done,
pop that aside and then to a bowl. You want
to make the dressing. So I've got three tablespoons of
red wine vinegar and then whiskey, and three tablespoons of
olive oil, one teaspoon of brown sugar, and a teaspoon
of dish or mustard, liver, bit of salt, little bit
of pepper. That's your dressing done, easy, peasy, lemon squeeze,

(02:55):
and then make up the rest of the ingredients. So
I've got eight small tomatoes. Choose that as you want,
four big, eight small half cup of chia bart or sorry,
half a cup of color mater olives that you've just
sliced in half. I've got a cup of chargol peppers.
They could be like peppers that you buy the Zu
mug or if you've got peppers yourself, you could charge
all them. Cut them up, and then a decent handful

(03:16):
of Italian parsley. So that's pretty much some pans, and
now are done. You've got your bread done, you've got
your dressing done, and then you've got your tomatoes or done.
Keep them all separate from now we'll pull them together
just as we serve it. Take your snapper filets. Heat
up that cast iron pan to it stinking hot. Take
your snapper filets. If you can get them with the
skin side on, even better because then you get the

(03:37):
crispy skin. You can't get it if it's got no skin.
Season it up. Chuck a whole pile of all over
the fish and then into the pan, skin side down.
And here's the trick to getting crispy skin snappers. Hold
your finger on top of the filet for five seconds,
or use like a spatchler, just to hold the flesh down,
and that will stop it from curling because when it curls.

(04:01):
You can't get krispy skin snapper. You just get it
crispy down the sides. So hold it five seconds. Once
that's set, and you can let your finger off and
put all the rest of the pullets in. Pull your
pants and our sella together. Simply just pull those ingredients
together and then dress it. Pop that onto a plate
and buy then your chrispy skin snap. It should be ready.
Leave it to cook for its entire time on the skin,

(04:22):
so that skin gets maximum heat maximum time, and it
will crisp it up. And then just at the last second,
just flip it over make sure it's fully cooked.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
And then said, oh, sounds so good. Even if the
weather isn't great, Well we are today. The fresh tomatoes
are on the vines. I just noticed yesterday my true
tomatoes are just starting to ripen. And I couldn't even
get them inside. I didn't them like you just there
and you just go, oh, that looks good. So I
had one, and then I found a few more and
sort of went inside and said to everyone, the tomatoes

(04:52):
are here, and they looked at me like, yeah, where
are they? Anime, I've beaten them amazing.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
But you know what, happened to us on Monday Tuesday.
We've got all these tomatoes are all green, they're all
ready to ripe it up. And then Monday and Tuesday
we had that real bad offshore. Wouldn't and just blew
them all off, blew them all off. We've probably got
twenty kiloads of tomatoes sitting on the ground, so we've
pulled them in. Yeah you can, you can. We've pulled

(05:18):
them and we'll put them onto trays and we're just
leaving them in in a sunny spot in the school
and they will ripe them up. Oh God, that's what
I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (05:27):
Anyway, fingers crossed. Oh Mike, thank you so much for
your time this morning. Always appreciate it. You can grab
that recipe from good from scratch dot co dot in seed.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudgin, listen
live to news Talks there'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.