A Perfect Pairing: Tart Cumquat Butter & Flaky Red Rock Cod
Who doesn’t love a quick and easy recipe that looks and tastes like a gourmet entree? I know I do! This dish certainly falls into that category. It’s takes little skill, about 20 minutes start to finish and plates beautifully.
Incorporating cumquats into the citrus butter highlights the Mediterranean influence of this buttery, tart fish dish. Be sure to leave a few whole rounds so that you can garnish the fish with a few recognizable slices.
Incredible Nutritional Benefits
Aside form their wonderful bright taste with sweet rind, cumquats are an incredibly nutritious and healing food. Packed with vitamins, precious minerals and antioxidants, cumquats have been linked to many important health benefits. Just a few include:
- Boost Immune System
- Anti-Cancer Properties
- Improve Blood Circulation
- Digestive Support
- Kidney Support/ Kidney Stone Prevention
- Anti-aging Properties/ Improved Skin
- Cardiovascular Support
- Cholesterol/ Weight Balancing
The combination of raw cumquats with pasture-raised butter, zest and essential fatty acid rich pan sized fish altogether makes for an outrageously healthy meal. The nutrients in each of these components play off each other, and the synergistic reaction makes the nutritional values more bio-avaialble to your body. Don’t skip the butter! It’s essential to helping your body absorb all these nutrients and to keeping you slim.
Cooking Notes
This is a very simple dish and you can easily follow along the recipe, but here are a few note son ingredients to consider.
Serve
Serve with a simple salad, pasta or potatoes. This fish pairs especially well with nettles if they’re available to you – that’s the pretty green garnished over the simple pasta in the final photos. But a basic arugula side salad will do just as well!
It’s also a perfect pairing to last week’s 20 Minute Artichoke With Smokey Fermented Aioli recipe! Both take about the same amount of time to prepare, so you’re still looking at about 30 minutes in the kitchen. Make the aioli the night before and you’ll be all set for a super quick, visually impressive and outrageously nutritious meal. Really, it’s all that.
The Fish
Red Rock Cod has a delicious mild and sweet, flaky meat with medium-firm texture. If you can’t find the same Red Rock Cod that I bought from a local fishmonger here in LA, this fish is part of the Pacific Rockfish family and can be found under Market Names: Snapper, Pacific snapper, rockfish, rock cod, black bass, Pacific ocean perch, amongst others.
Just take care to buy a pan sized fish. The smaller the fish, the less pollution it carries with it. Unfortunately this is the reality, but eating fish a couple times a month can have greta health benefits. So no need to get scared off of seafood entirely, just be smart and ginger in your consumption.
The Citrus
Be sure that all your citrus is organic and preferably from a farm that you know does not use any chemicals or dyes. In addition to the toxic pesticides, the skin of conventional oranges and other citrus fruits are often dyed.
Leave a few thin cumquats slices whole, for a pretty garnish effect.
The Butter
If you can get your hands on raw pasture raised butter you’ll be especially golden, but pasteurized pasture-raised butter works too. Just beware of the tongue twister! If you’re in California seek out Organic Pasture’s raw butter. I suggest you get the unsalted cultured cream, as salt promotes fermentation and makes for a funkier butter.
Cows that graze on grasses produce a butter that’s rich in nutrients. Not to mention buying pasture-raised means that the butter is coming from healthy animals, which again results in healthy butter.
TOOLS & PANTRY SHOPPING LIST
You can make this recipe with what pan you have available at home, and you certainly don’t need a double boiler, but it’s a cheap investment that has made my life tons easier! Here are a few of my favorite things that you might consider adding to your toolkit if you’ve yet to invest in them.
- Universal Stainless Steel Double Boiler ($10)
- 10-1/4-Inch Le Creuset Signature Iron Handle Skillet (This naturally nearly non-stick pan gets used multiple times each day! Best investment ever.)
- Microplane for Zest
- Kyocera Ceramic 3.5″ Ceramic Ginger Grater (stick with the 3.5″, the larger ones don’t work as well)
- Wild Himalayan Pink Salt
- Organic Gluten-free Black Peppercorns
Now go and enjoy this wonderfully tart and buttery dish!
Citrus Infused Red Rock Cod (feat. Cumquat)
This citrus infused, buttery fish dish is especially delightful with the addition of tart & sweet cumquats, making this easy recipe look and feel like a gourmet feat! Complete the meal by serving alongside pasta, mashed potatoes or a simple salad.
- Prep Time: 15m
- Cook Time: 7m
- Total Time: 22m
- Serves: 2
- Yield: 2 Fillets
Ingredients
Fish
- 1 pound Wild Red Rock Cod (or other rockfish - see cooking notes)
- 1 tablespoon Butter
- 1 tablespoon Olive Oil
Citrus Butter
- 2 tablespoons Pasture-Raised Butter, softened
- 6 Kumquats with rinds, de-seeded, finely sliced and chopped
- Zest of 1 Organic Orange
- Zest of 1 Organic Lemon
- 1/2 teaspoon Fresh Organic Ginger, minced or grated
- pinch Himalayan Sea Salt, to taste
- 1/2 teaspoon Black Pepper, fresh cracked
- 4 Mint Leaves, minced, plus a couple more for garnish
Instructions
- Using a double boiler melt the butter until soft and combine with Citrus Butter ingredients. Mix well and set aside.
- Heat pan on medium heat and melt butter. Once melted add olive oil. Heat for 15-20 seconds. Turn heat up to high and place fish skin up in the pan. Lightly salt the skin and sear for 3 minutes. Using two spatulas to keep the fish from falling apart, carefully flip the fish and reduce heat to medium. Spoon half the citrus butter over the fish. Cover partially to reduce splattering and fry for 4 more minutes.
- Plate and remove from pan as soon as finished to prevent the oils from becoming absorbed by the fish. Garnish with remaining citrus butter.
