Grilled Fish, Romagna Style
Okay, I really didn’t want to show you this picture. But I decided to anyway. Not everything is perfect.
This recipe is for a grilled fish recipe from Romagna, on the northern Adriatic shore. The area is famous for it’s fish, which is usually marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, rosemary, and bread crumbs then grilled. Marcella’s recipe called for any type of whole fish, or even fish steaks. I decided to use Yellow-eye, a type of Rockfish we catch here in Alaska.
While I don’t have a before picture of this exact fish I grilled, here is a photo of me holding one my husband caught the same weekend out on our boat in Prince William Sound. The fish looks the same, except the one I am holding here is larger. It didn’t seem so impressive to take a photo of me holding the smaller one that I caught.
Okay, back to cooking the fish. The fish needed to be gutted and scaled. Scaling is a pain, and my husband decided that in the future, when I wanted to cook a whole fish, I could purchase one that’s already been scaled. (He didn’t like having to clean those scales from the boat because they stick like glue.) You wash and dry the fish, and sprinkle it with salt and pepper. You then place it in a large dish, and add olive oil, lemon juice, and fresh rosemary. You coat the fish with this mixture, then add a coating of bread crumbs. After marinating for 1-2 hours, you place on the grill. Whether it was a mistake or not, I’m not sure, but I placed the fish on foil on my gas grill. The fish cooked nicely, but when it came time to turn the fish over to cook the other side, there was a problem. The fish stuck to the foil. I managed, but as you can see from the photo, the fish lost part of his skin and his tail (I tried putting that back in place. No such luck with the skin.).
Okay, the fish didn’t look the best, but boy, did it taste good. The lemon and rosemary flavor really came through. Next time, I’ll try the recipe using fish steaks. Should be a lot easier.
I’ve made the same resolution after scaling the 3 bluefish a well-meaning friend gave me a few years ago. I was finding scales on my backsplash a week later.
Your fish looks yummy! I love cooking whole fish, although I’ve also had the sticking issue, even after oiling the grill or foil. Ah well.
Cindy, that is a shame about the fish sticking to the foil, but I am sure the fish was delicious nonetheless.
Great photo of you!
What a magnificent fish, Cindy. Do you know how lucky you are? It doesn’t need to look any better than that because it looks wonderful to eat. I don’t understand why you would reduce the benefit of cooking directly over the grill by laying it on foil. Are you cooking on electric or charcoal? You have to gut the fish, of course, but you don’t always have to scale it. Italians often will skip scaling to keep the fish fresher. You just need to be careful when you lift the skin off the fish. Of course, if you like the partly charred skin, and I do, you must scale and you must definitely not use foil. I keep the grill very well oiled so that the fish can more easily slip off it when I turn it.
Marcella-Thanks for the comments. I do feel very lucky to be able to have such fresh fish that we’ve caught. I don’t know why I put the fish on foil. I guess I thought it might fall through the grates. I use a gas grill. We grill fish all of the time, but it’s usually fillets, which we place on foil. I don’t care for the fish skin, so I never really thought about how it would crisp up on the grill. I’ll try that next time. When I was growing up, we always ate fried fish (bass, bluegill, etc.) and it was fried and always had the skin on.
I love the picture. Thank for sharing it.