Thai Green Curry Seabass with Chef Frankie

Hey guys, welcome to Make This Tonight. I'm Frankie Salenza and what I'm doing right now is slapping my lemongrass. This like, it brings the essential oils to the front of the lemongrass. I don't know if you've ever made like a mojito, for example, and you take the the mint and you slap the mint and natural oils come to the front. The aromas are pungent and fantastic. This is the kind of stuff that makes flavor more intense. If I just cut it, it's not the same thing. So start slapping your lemongrass. Anyway, this is essential to the dish I'm making, which is a curry. It's a green curry, different than an Indian curry. Comes from Malaysia and Thailand and it opened up my world to the entire hemisphere, if you will, of coconut curries and Southeast Asian curries. So let me start with my lemongrass here by trying to get it in half, something like that. And I'm not really going to chop it so much. It's very fibrous. All I want to do is pull more essential oils out of it in a hot pan. And we're going to do that alongside a little bit of garlic, which I'll smash very lightly and a little bit of ginger. I'm a huge fan of peeling the ginger with a spoon. You can just kind of go like this all the way around. So these three aromatics are fundamental to this dish. So it makes them light and delicious. So let's just get a few discs of ginger like that. And the reason we're going with big pieces is because I want to extract all of these from the pan. So here we go. We got a little fire happening and we start with a neutral oil, grapeseed, canola, vegetable. Olive oil is a huge mistake right here. It is entirely too aromatic. So you can see the oil smiling a little bit. It's really a shimmer. Get a little bit of ginger in there that didn't quite get the sizzle that I was looking for. No matter. All right. Come alive. Come alive. So get a little bit of life happening here. And in the meantime, let's start building our green curry. So when I first started making this dish, I was literally using a green curry paste that you can buy in the store. And that's what I was using. But now, as I've learned from more people and talked to friends, I've realized it's not that complicated to make. So we can put some green bell peppers in here. Going back and forth a little bit. Notice our garlic. Aromatic. Brown. The aromas of the ginger that are sort of frying in the pan. Incredible. And lemongrass. What does it smell like? Honestly, it smells like wheat if it were lemon. We got the lemongrass going in. Got more pieces of ginger. And green curry, obviously, needs to have green things in it. So you could put green scallions. You can put cilantro. You can put parsley. I got some mint happening. Fresh. Light. I do have cilantro as well. I know some people hate it. I think it's just fantastic. I'm going to go stems and all. We've got some white onion we can throw in. And we can add a little water. But in this case, I'm going with some chicken stock. So the chicken stock goes in. And that's just going to help us blend it a little bit. Here we go. So if nothing's happening, come in with a little more liquid. Maybe a little more water. Maybe you need to give it a shake. There we go. Beautiful. Nice and green. Let's come back to our hot pan. And we're just going to add some coconut milk straight to it. Now, this is the kind of like weird little things that I've picked up along the way. Tom, down at the Thai grocer, Tom said that it's very important you only use the fat part of the coconut milk. I guess the water underneath that separates is just not flavorful enough. So I've always done that. When I see a recipe that says a can of coconut milk, I go light and I just go with the fat stuff. Here we are. This is what differs this from an Indian curry. This is what makes this creamy and velvety in your mouth. All right. So you start seeing it chub up a little bit like that. And then we can throw our homemade curry paste straight in. Here we go. It's going to be a little chunky. And what we're looking for now is very simply to cook this down, to reduce the amount of water that's in there. You see how liquidious this is? When I pull this spoon through, I want it to be a lot thicker. So maybe reduce it by 40-ish percent. We've got our homemade green curry paste. We've got the coconut milk in there. And what we're going to do is sweeten this with some palm sugar, a little bit of fish sauce for salt, and some lime. But we're not going to do it right now because, again, this is reducing down. If we add those three flavor elements, what are we going to have? We're going to have something that's too sweet, too salty, and the acid is going to be lost because it's going to get cooked down. So first reduction, then we're going to go with flavor. When we come back, I'll tell you all about where this dish came from. All right, guys. Welcome back. So we're making a sea bass in a green curry. Curry's cooking down right now. And while it does, I thought we'd make a watermelon salad. It's so bright. It's so fresh. And the color contrast, I think it's good to have the two things. So right now I've got half of a watermelon, and I'm just trying to make sort of like half-inch grids all around. I think bite-sized pieces are really nice. But right now I've got matchsticks, so I think I'll lay them flat, kind of like this. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And then just come across. And now I've got nice little cubes. They don't have to be perfect. So this is a dish my friend Aria showed me. She's from Malaysia. And I had her on my local television show in New York City many, many years ago. And we made this dish together. But what was cool about that day and applicable to this situation right here is that we also made a striped bass dish. We made a nice Malaysian fish dish with it, and then we made this watermelon salad. So there we go. We've got our cubed watermelons. I'm just going to throw them into the bowl here. Again, the size of the pieces don't matter so much, just so long as they are relatively equal size. I think that makes it look just slightly more refined. All right, so we've got a grapefruit here. And when you're cooking at home, it's really the perfect time to practice anything with knife skills. So supreming is when you look at all the veins of the citrus and you try to cut just to the side of it and leave them behind. You can kind of go like that there, and you can see the other vein here. I'm going to come just inside of it. And then when I pull the piece out like that, the idea is that it is free of the fiber. You know, like when you bite right into an orange and there's all that white pithy stuff left behind. Well, in this situation, we're trying to leave it all on the core here. So this is nice. I'm going to leave them whole here, just so they're differentiated from the watermelon, since they are similar colors. Now I get the vein here, we'll come to this side, we'll go there, and we're just going to repeat this process the whole way around. And when you're not working on the line at the restaurant, you pretty much have all the time in the world to make this happen. So, you know, cut at your pace and ask yourself every time before you go to make a slice, if I slip, will I cut myself? And the answer should always be no. If it's yes, don't make the cut. Change your left hand. The main idea here is just to get as much of the good stuff that we want. So this is what's left behind. This is when you were a kid and mom packed the orange in your lunchbox and you didn't really want to eat it because you had like candy or something instead. This is the bit of the orange where you're like, ah, I don't really like oranges. But you do know deep down inside that natural citrus is like so fresh and so delicious. Well, guess what? We got all that fresh and delicious stuff here, and this is the bad stuff. We can squeeze this too. There's still juice in there, so why don't we? Actually, let's go right into what's going to be our dressing jar. Get a little bit of the grapefruit in there. Happening. So I'm going a little free form here. It's really important that when you read a recipe or someone gives you a recipe or something, it's just a guideline. It's a guideline and you are totally allowed to make modifications. And if you taste something and it doesn't taste right, but the recipe said two tablespoons, like don't be afraid to add more of something to make it right. Because, you know, flavors change and ingredients depending on where you're buying them on the planet. So, all right, we got a little bit of scallion here. Real quick. This is a good one to practice the left hand being a guide and just come right through. And this is going to give us a little fresh crunch in our salad. And those are the main elements that we've got here. Now we're going to move on to the dressing, which is where the real magic happens. Also, the dressing is what ties this dish back to our curry. So the magic ingredient right now is fish sauce. If you've never had this before, it's so pungent. So we'll start with, call it a tablespoon, and that's our salt on steroids. It's also going to be in the curry, so it ties it back together. There's something about fish sauce with watermelon and extra virgin olive oil, a little bit of peanut. It's just so good. So I'm going to go with traditional salad dressing quantities here, which is sort of like two parts oil to one part acid. All right, well you can see the separation happening here. It's like second grade science class when you put the maple syrup in the glass with the, you know, the cola and the dish soap and they all separate it into different elements. We don't have any vinegar, let's get some vinegar in there. Here we go, a tiny bit, and let's get a little sugar in there too. So the idea is we want this to be sweet, we want this to be acidic, and we want it to be pungent in the salty area. So let's get that on, let's give it a shake. A great way to make a dressing in general is in one of these jars. And now let's have a little taste, because just because the recipe says to do something doesn't mean that it's right. You gotta, you gotta find out. Wow! So I don't taste fish sauce, but I taste a ton of salt, and I got really nice fresh olive oil up front, and the vinegar is just like a zing. It's amazing. I got really lucky, usually I have to make a modification, but today I do not. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna throw some peanuts right here, and let's get our dressing right around the side. Boom, boom, boom. Give it a little, a little shake. Maybe we'll grab a little spoon to help out here. And when the fish sauce and olive oil dressing gets absorbed into the watermelons, it seems like it should go with a green curry. Okay, let's get it on a plate. I'm gonna use this really cute slotted spoon to make that happen. There we go. You can see where the small watermelons really look pretty on the plate right now. Try this guy. Delicious. How about some fresh mint? Tiny bit. Just peel some of the leaves off. Go in full circle here. Remember at the beginning with the lemongrass? And I can smell the mint from here now. It's amazing. So just scatter that around. Make sure you don't have any stems, but the leaves are so pretty, I don't want to chop them. I just want to showcase them. Very vibrant right now. This is kind of wacky, but I'm going for it. I've got some hazelnuts here, and I just wanted to microplane them on top, just to give another element of nut, but also to like mimic cheese. So there we've got watermelon salad with a fish sauce and vinegar dressing. It's going to go perfect with our green curry and sea bass. When we come back, I'm going to show you how this dish came into my mind and how to finish it off. Welcome back to Make This Tonight. I'm going to get the sea bass going. I just want to get two little scores in the skin of my fish here. So as this sears in the pan, the skin of the fish and the flesh underneath, they're going to contract at different rates. And by having two little slits in there, it helps give some leeway so they stay together and they don't separate from each other. You can put the skin side up right in the oven under the broiler, or you can go into a nonstick pan with a high smoke oil, like grapeseed, and get that going. Nice. Yeah, cool. You can hit it with a little bit of salt on the other side here. It's completely naked of spices on the skin side. It's not a problem. And let's come over to our curry while this starts searing. So here we are. You can see the color has darkened quite a bit. When I pull the spoon through, it has thickened. And now is the time when we can taste this for the sugar, for the acid, and for the salt. All right, let's see where we're at with our curry, coconut curry, green curry. Definitely needs salt. Coming in with a secret ingredient. It is fish sauce. Why is it the secret ingredient? I'm like half Italian, so every Italian grandma throws anchovies into every single dish. And then every single person that eats it goes, why is this so good? It's a secret. But the secret's always anchovy. So there's our secret ingredient. How are we tasting now? Let's have another little bite. Salt is there. Now it needs sweetness. It tastes very lemongrassy. We need some stuff happening. So this is palm sugar. It literally comes from a palm tree. And it's way less sugary than a refined white sugar. All right, so we got our sugar in. We got our salt in. Much sweeter. And now I need a zing. I need acid. I want to pull open in every single realm of the flavor circle. I'm gonna kill the heat now, and I'm just gonna squeeze this around. It is a curry. It is not an insane curry, but curry to me means it should have a ton of flavor. And with that in mind, you know what? Why not add a little more fish sauce? So early on I told you this dish appeared in my mind in the strangest of all places. A couple years back, my dad's birthday is New Year's Eve, so it's always a fun time. He has like the biggest party anybody gets for a birthday every single year. He was turning 60, and he decided that we should all go to Asia because we'd never been before. And we took this train from Singapore up through Malaysia, ending in Four nights, sleeping on the train, and every single day, we'd stop for like six hours, get off the train, and go learn about the local culture in food. So there was one day when we stopped at the monkey college. Like the monkeys literally get trained on how to pick coconuts from the tree, so we watched that. But the coolest thing was every single day, I'm slicing some zucchini by the way, every single day, the chef would go to the local markets, gather ingredients, and then when we got back on the train, the curries changed as the train progressed and went north. So this was a dish that I tried on a train in Malaysia on the way to Thailand, made by a chef, and it was delicious. It was a green curry with a beautiful piece of white sea bass. It had some mandolin, zucchini, and tomatoes around it. And I started hanging out with the chef, and he showed me like the basics of this. And this is not his recipe per se, but I don't know if I would ever have gotten into the world of there are many more curries than you think, had it not been for that train. Super duper fun. All right, let's flip our fish over here. Skin looks nice and crispy. I'm gonna throw some tomatoes in the pan, just a few. See if I can like do this with the zucchini, try and give them a little bit of shape, but I want to get the water out of them. So I'm just gonna wrap them around my fingers. All right, now I'm just gonna let the fish cook all the way through. I'm gonna double check my curry, make sure all those flavors are there, and we're gonna plate it up. All right, here we are. The time has come. The fish looks really nice. Beautiful piece of sea bass. We're gonna throw that right in the pan like this. Get a couple of these blistered tomatoes in there. Our little zucchini stayed rolled up nicely. Scatter those around. I like that. And this guy right here. Cool. Now let's get the curry in there. You could run this through a sieve if you wanted to be like extra refined, but that's not what I'm looking for here. I like the chunkiness of it. It's a delicious paste and I'm trying to like avoid getting it on the top of the fish because I want to showcase that really nice skin that we worked so hard on and scored beautifully. We got the sea bass in the green curry from the train, the Orient Express that starts in Singapore, goes all the way through Malaysia, finally hits Thailand. We got a watermelon salad. It's got a fish sauce dressing, which is pungent and amazing, and that ties it right over to our sea bass and green curry. So let's have a little bit of it. You can hear the skin. Really nice. Let's get a little piece of the fish. There she is. Let's get some of that curry on there. Very nice. Oh, clean, clean flavor on the fish. Crispy skin. And then it's all rounded out by our spicy, acidic, and sweet curry, which if you think of curry as just an Indian food, this is completely going to change your mind about it. It's a whole different realm. And then what do we have over here to kind of pair with the whole thing? Fresh, crisp, light, and palate cleansing. These are not that complicated. I know you can make it. You should make it tonight.