The Poor Knife Skills Fish Soup

There's no secret that I'm bad at filleting fish, but today I want to show you how you can turn such a tragedy into an extremely rich, creamy, wonderfully flavoursome fish soup. As the wonderful fisherman from Marseille has given us the bouillabaisse, today I'm giving you the pool knife skills fish soup. Let's do it. First up, let's horribly fillet some fish. By the way, you don't need to be bad at this to make this dish. You just have to leave a bit of flesh on the bones, or add some flesh for that matter, given that we have absolutely no pressure. I'm not even using the right knife for this exercise. So this would get me fired at all fishmongers and probably most restaurants. Now we cut them into smaller chunks. Today I'm using just the European sea bass, but you can do this with any oily white fish. Thoroughly filleted fish, done. Now for any fish soup, I like to add a tonne of white peppercorn, to the extent that you could call this a white peppercorn soup with a touch of fish. And to get the most of your white peppercorn, and for that matter, many of your spices, always beneficial to toast them. So we bring some heat and move them around to prevent them from burning. And this will be the pot we use to make our fish soup, so we don't even need to rinse it. Keeping all the wonderful essential oil, and saving you from having to wash something, which at W2 Kitchen is a very treasured quality, once they are extremely fragrant, meaning your whole living room smells like white peppercorn, they come out, and we turn up the heat close to high. And we want to do that before we add the oil, to prevent the fish from sticking excessively. A bit of sticking is okay, but you don't want them to catch before you could brown the rest. Once your pot is smoking hot, we add a relatively generous amount of vegetable oil, or any neutral high smoke point oil. Once your oil is shimmering, we add the fish bones. By the way, if the head bothers you, you don't have to add it, just use the bones. And while this is searing, we boil some water. Some optional ingredients that always go well with white fish. We have some ginger. This will tame the unwanted fishiness from your fish, if there's any. A bit of scallion. Cook the other side. Beautiful. And we're building flavours with the caramelisation of the fish, with the Maillard reaction, giving the broth more complex flavours. Salt, quite generously, factoring in the liquid we're about to add. The moment the water is boiling, we have the fun part. We add a generous amount of boiling water to the fish, and three extremely incredible things are happening at the same time. First, the emulsification between the fish oil and the boiling water, already giving us some creamy looking liquid. Second, the fish protein that has been released from the cooking process, the collagen and the albumin in particular, are being denatured by the boiling water, being released into the liquid. Once again, giving us the thickness and the colour. And third, the connective tissues in the fish being released into the liquid, becoming collagen, which will further thicken this liquid in due course. So now, we add a very generous amount of toasted white peppercorn, and again optional, a bit of coriander, stalks included, they are the flavours and bits. And fish this size, they have very delicate structures, that it takes 20-30 minutes to extract almost everything from them. So this is a very wonderful weekday meal. So, lid on, maintaining high heat. We cook this for 25-30 minutes. I'll see you then. Alright, after 25 minutes on the stove at high heat, this is what we have. Just look at this colour. It's as if I've added double cream to it. And the smell of the peppercorn and the coriander is incredible. So now, the soup is ready. Just to take it to the next level, we'll strain it and add some finishing touches. Fish soup does not get better than this. So now, we bring in some heat. And here, with the same poor knife skills, I've skinned and sliced the fish fillets to add to the fish soup. I've soaked some vermicelli, some glass noodles. The ideal choice for this would have been rice vermicelli. I just ran out, so this is bean vermicelli, which has a firmer texture, and the scallion that we didn't use. So, we simply add a generous amount of vermicelli, just to soak up all the milky goodness, but not too much, it's soup after all. And we add our fish fillets to poach. And these cook in seconds. Scallion. And once this is back to a boil, this creamy goodness is good to go. I personally like to add a second round of coriander, but that's completely optional. And that's it! It all started with some poor filleting skills. 25-30 minutes later, we have an incredible, incredible creamy fish soup. This is the Poor Knife Skills Fish Soup. I really, really hope you enjoy.