Broiled Fish and Eggs Breakfast (4-star = Very Good Food)

Cook and prep time: 20 minutes

Care of the New York Times, here’s a recipe for an excellent weekend breakfast.  After skiing yesterday, sleeping for 10 hours, and having this (and an almond horn from Larsen’s), I feel pretty good.  I also need to get better at taking pictures of food if I’m gonna keep this blogging thing up…

Fish and Eggs a la Mike

a la Melissa Clark

Tools

• cast iron skillet
• cutting board
• knife
• spatula

Ingredients

• 1/2 pound rockfish (2 filets) (or any other cheap, fresh whitefish)
• 3 eggs
• 1 T butter
• scallions, chopped
• 2 T capers
• salt and pepper

Method

1. Heat skillet under broiler for 5 – 10 minutes until smoking hot.  While waiting, prepare the fish for cooking.  If it’s not super-fresh, rinse the fish and pat dry before prep.  Salt and pepper the fish.  Coarsely chop 3 or 4 scallions.
2. Place 1/4 T butter into the hot skillet.  Add fish to skillet with remaining 3/4 T butter sectioned and placed on top of the fish.  Broil fish for 2 minutes (8-10 mins per inch of thickness is a general rule).
3. After 2 minutes, crack three eggs over the fish and broil for 2 more minutes.
4. Plate, add in scallions and capers.  Break egg yolks over the fish to increase the decadence.

Update (January 12)

Pan frying over medium heat works just as well as broiling.  The only difference is the fish needs to be flipped halfway through, and the eggs should be cooked directly on the pan instead of over the fish.  They can be placed on the fish when plated with no noticeable difference.

Broiled Dry-Aged Ribeye (4-star = Very Good Food)

There are two reasons steak houses broil steaks: it’s quick and it creates awesome flavor. I dare say that I think broiling is better than grilling, at least in my hands.

Here’s my second ever home-broiled steak: a 16-oz Niman Ranch dry-aged ribeye I got for Christmas.

Results

Ribeye, pilaf, and Nathan's Duppelbock

Ready for your close up?

Came out pretty delicious, especially the little piece of crispy fat hanging off the edge, but cooking to uniform medium rare didn’t really work out. The steak is so thick (2″) that after browning, it was still raw inside. For those of you who wonder, “where are the vegetables?”, I ate a salad two hours later. I figure let’s not compete with the steak. The pilaf, eaten mostly after the meat, was great for mopping up.

What I did

1. Get steak to room temperature. Rub with olive oil and salt with kosher salt (about 1/2 t per side)
2. Following the guidelines from this website (Lindauer Farms) and previous experience, I placed Nathan’s well-seasoned cast iron skillet dry under the broiler for 10 minutes. Then, after everything was smoking hot, I broiled the steak for 3.5 minutes on each side. This creates excellent color and texture, but doesn’t go too far and burn anything.
3. For a 1″ steak, this is a sufficient amount of cooking, but for this 2″ behemoth, it wasn’t. It required about 10 more minutes in the oven, set to 500 degrees (but I doubt it ever got there). I took the steak out 5 times, cut gently once into the middle to see, meat thermometered it repeatedly until it got to around 120 degrees (not sure if I trust the thermometer), and finally took it out.

It came out quite good (the edges were so awesomely tasty; body under-salted a bit though), but was a little over-cooked in places, as is not obvious from the well-chosen pinup above.

Seeing as I’ve got another ribeye in the freezer, there will be a

Next time

1. Get steak to room temperature. Rub with olive oil and salt with kosher salt (about 1 t per side)
2. For a 2″ thick steak, bake in skillet for 10-15 minutes in a 300-degree oven to get the middle started (up to around 90-100 degrees).
3. Take steak out and tent under foil. Get broiler going.
4. Broil 3.5-4 minutes per side.
5. Enjoy.

The idea is to get the middle going first without worrying about the char. Then, broil it to beauty. Another, related idea is the slow pan cook of a thick steak presented here.

Update (January 11, 2009)

The “Next time” approach isn’t better! It’s still pretty damn good, but not better.  The steak came out a touch over-salted, the fat didn”t crisp up as nice, and the risk of burning during broiling is higher since the steak’s surface temperature is higher at the start.  Broil first, then nervously baking to completion is definitely preferable.