Recipe Notes: Butter-Basted Fish with Garlic and Thyme

16 June 2020

Recipe from Cook's Illustrated, March 2020

If you watch cooking shows on TV or online you've no doubt seen chefs cooking food in a skillet, madly spooning hot oil or butter from the skillet over the food. While apparently a common restaurant cooking technique this is not often done in the home kitchen. The recent edition of Cook's Illustrated provided a recipe teaching this technique and I gave it a try.

I purchased a little a 0.6 pound wild Pacific Cod fillet, about 1-inch thick. (Finding fillets thick enough can be a challenge.) The fillet was cut into two portions, patted dry, and seasoned with salt and pepper. It was placed in skillet with hot oil and cooked on both sides over medium heat. Butter was added to the pan and when it had melted a large spoon was used to ladle hot butter over the fish, alternated with periods of cooking without basting. Several cycles of this led to an internal temperature of about 130° at which point garlic cloves and thyme sprigs were added to the pan. The basting/resting cycle continued until the temperature of the fish reached 140°. Total time was 25 minutes.

This was indeed a fun technique to try and a quick, easy way to cook fish. The smell that came out of the pan when the thyme and garlic were added to the hot butter was amazing, though I didn't detect that flavor in the finished fish. I made one major error by not using a nonstick skillet. Oops. My fish stuck to the pan and cooked unevenly and in the end was a little overdone. This is certainly a technique to try again, with the correct pan. I would be interested in learning how to adapt it to cook chicken or steak.