On Sunday for Company Dinner our friends brought the main entree. They very generously shared some shrimp that had been brought for them from the gulf coast, as well as a flounder that their parents had caught themselves. They prepared the shrimp at home for cooking before coming over, but when they arrived, I was handed a zipper bag with a piece of fish and a question. “What do we do with this?”
I’ve never seen flounder, and to my knowledge, had never eaten it, and this fish is constructed in a way unlike others that I have experience with. The piece of fish we had appeared to be the tail end, although it was whole, it had a top and a bottom, and it had the bones running right through it. Yet there was no spot where the guts had been removed. Had the rest of the fish been attached, I could have filleted it and been done with it, but this one puzzled us all. It also had these fins running along both sides of the fish, not just on the top. It was an interesting piece of fish! We decided to throw it in a foil packet, and since it had been scaled, we decided to leave it whole.
The first thing I did was I took a very sharp knife and cut three slits in both sides of the flounder. Then I rubbed the fish generously with some grey sea salt and added some black pepper. I began slicing a lemon to add the packet, when someone mentioned cajun seasoning, so I grabbed that as well to sprinkle the fish with. And of course, we had to use butter as well. So a sprinkle of cajun seasoning, a few pats of butter and a few slices of lemon were added to the packet. The last thing I did before sealing up the packet was to
squeeze the juice of a half a lemon over the whole thing. Andy threw it on a searing hot grill and gave it maybe 5-10 minutes tops.
And let me tell you, I am enamored with flounder. It’s a lovely white fish-not unlike others I have had. It’s definitely not meaty and steaky like catfish, and there was absolutely no trace of a muddy flavor. It tasted light and of the sea. We removed the fish from the top half of the piece, and then the layer of bones just lifted right off- it was cooked perfectly. I guess the moral of the story is that when in doubt, you just can’t go wrong with salt, butter, and lemon to dress a fish. It has me wondering if flounder is something I could buy at a fish counter, so I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye out for it. Flounder is a very good thing.
Nicely done! I tend to get intimidated by whole fish, but it’s sooo good and so flavorful that it’s totally worth the dare.
I’m very impressed! Like Lia, I find whole fish really intimidating – that’s awesome that it turned out so well!
This is the second or third time this same friend has brought us mystery fish to play with- and both times we just attacked it head on and they turned out fabulous. Lia, it definitely is much more flavorful when cooked whole…but then you have bones and fins and things like that to contend with and figure out how to find. I’m getting more confident though, one of these days I want to try salt-roasting a fish.
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