How To Cook Mackerel Fillets

I'm going to show you a lovely way of doing mackerel. We're going to marinate it in a saffron and orange dressing. I've got some white wine vinegar going into the bowl.

I've got some orange juice, freshly squeezed. I've got a little bit of honey, it's runny honey. I've got some saffron stamens, a little bit of light soy, and take a teaspoon of dijon mustard, and we're just going to work those ingredients together.

I've got some extra virgin olive oil, just drizzle that in a little bit at a time. We're going to put a tiny, tiny bit of rock salt in there and a couple of twists of black pepper. We're just going to let all of those ingredients infuse together.

The saffron is going to become a really bright orange color. Now that we've made our marinade, I'm going to show you how to fillet this mackerel to marinade it in our liquor, but first, what I'm going to do is take one tablespoon of this out and put that onto a very thinly sliced fennel which is absolutely gorgeous when it's raw. I'm going to put a little bit more salt in there and a couple of twists of pepper.

So, what we're going to do here, the fish has already been gutted, we're going to remove the two fillets, so just take the knife under the gill. When you get to the middle bone, just turn the knife under the fish and push down and just take the fillet off, nice and gently like that. I think mackerel might be the easiest fish to fillet because it is just like going through butter, everything is so soft.

Now, we're just going to clean these two fillets up here slightly where the stomach was, there are a few bones to trim away there. There's one there, so one there and the same on this one, just shave there. We're just going to trim away on the top.

So, we've got two lovely mackerel fillets there now, and this is absolutely full of bones here, but instead of plucking every single one of those out, the bones are really soft and have a tendency to snap. So what we're going to do is cut a slight V, like that. We're going to waste a tiny bit of meat but more importantly, we're going to take all those bones out.

So that's one done there. And the next one, like that, be careful not to cut too deep or you'll cut through the skin on the other side. And what we're going to do now is just cut three nice diamonds like that.

And we're just going to place those into our marinating liquor. Because this fish is quite skinny, fifteen minutes is probably all we need to marinate this fish. By now, our mackerel has had about fifteen minutes in the liquor.

See, it's stained up nicely and just started to cook through a little bit. We're going to pan fry these, but not all the way through. We still need them to be quite rare inside.

And I'm going to pan fry them in this heavy pan here, and I've put in it some baking parchment and we're going to fry on top of that because the honey in that liquor is still going to stick to the pan. So, we're going to get our pan nice and hot, and while we're waiting for the pan to get hot, we've got our fennel salad that's gone nice and soft now. We're just going to make three little piles here.

The pan's warm enough so we'll put a little drizzle of olive oil here, and put three little bits of our mackerel like that. Once we have a nice caramel color on the bottom of the mackerel, we're just going to turn that over, very, very gently. And it just blackens just slightly because of the honey in there.

And then, we're going to remove that from the heat and let it carry on cooking with the residual heat from the pan. And here, I've got some saffron dressing, we're just going to drizzle a little bit of that on the plate. We're going to remove our mackerel now, and we're going to place a little bit of mackerel on top of our piles of fennel.

I've got some diced flesh of tomato. I think tomato and orange go fantastically well together. And just to give it a little bit of green, I'm going to put a bit of rocket on the