How to Cook Fresh Sardines in the Oven

Welcome back everybody. To finish on our series on regional food we're going to go to Brittany and I wanted to share this dish here which is one of the easiest ways to cook sardines or other fish. Now this particular video is taken actually from one of our courses and it is all dedicated to regional food. So if you want to learn more about regional food I've got this course already ready. We're exploring three regions, the North, Brittany and the Loire Valley. In each region we're making a starter, a main and a dessert. Link in the video description if you want to learn more and enroll. But for now let's learn how to make this beautiful dish called the sardinopla. For this first recipe I wanted to do something with fish but I did not want to get the common fish we always use and rather use something that is a bit of the underdog of the fish aka the oily fish. Oily fish in Brittany and around the Atlantic are used a lot. So the mackerel is one of them and then you've got of course the sardines. Fresh sardines are beautiful. Mackerels I kind of like them but the problem they can be really dry if you don't prepare them properly. Well the sardines are really nice and fatty at all time and they're really really tasty. Only problem though making sardines at home means usually grilling them and grilling sardines is a smelly business. You have to do this outside. So I thought why not dig out a simple one pot recipe that will allow you to enjoy sardines anytime you want in an instant using a simple dish, a few ingredients and all what you need is an oven. Okay the sardines are going to be cooked on a bed of shallots with some lemon, some wine, some herbs and this is a perfect way to reconnect with sardines if you've left them behind and perhaps if you've never tried them this is the perfect time to try them. So let me show you what we need for this recipe. Let's go. Now this is my type of recipe and this is the type of recipe I love more and more. There are recipes that don't use many ingredients that use a fish for instance here that is readily available and not expensive and can be made in a very very short amount of time. We're gonna need some juice of a lemon so you can have a lemon. We're gonna squeeze some juice. We're gonna have the sardines. We're gonna dice some shallots. We're gonna chop some parsley, use some butter and have some dry white wine just a little bit. The cooking is going to happen in a dish. I'm using just a small portion to show you. You can use a larger dish if you want. The technique is the same and it works not only with sardines but also with other fishes. So if you're looking at an easy way to prepare a fish in the oven and with trying sardines, mackerel, anything use that technique. It is super simple. When it comes to the sardines, these are fresh, pre-prepared, ready to cook sardines meaning that they've been gutted and the heads have been removed. If you're a purist like in Brittany or other parts, it is said that the sardines should never be attached. You mean you have to cook it with the head and the guts because the taste resides on the inside. But I guess this is for the purist. For me, I like not to have the heads because you can fit more sardines in there. So you're not going to eat the head. So more space, more real estate, equal more sardines. But that's it for the preparation. Ultra simple. And now let me show you how this dish is made and only takes about seven minutes to cook. How beautiful is that? All my ingredients are ready and we can now prepare the dish. For the shallots, very important. The shallots have to be really thinly, thinly diced when you make this instant dish. So I said seven minutes, maybe a bit over optimistic. Let's call about 10 minutes. The preparation is extremely simple. You can take a small or a larger dish. I'm just going to do about five, maybe six sardines at a time. And we're going to add, I've got two teaspoons, about what, maximum three teaspoons of shallots in there. We're then going to use some butter. Same thing for the butter. It is cut in very, very small cubes. So I'm going to add a few little cubes in there. And remember that this is something you can do with other fish. So if you use other fish, use fillets of course. The fish with the bones is good for the sardines, but that's about it. Now for the sardines, what I'm going to do here, okay, is to place them and have the tails on one side. And for instance, for the other one, I'm going to take another sardine here and I'm going to put it on the other side. So you get that look on here. One tail here, one tail here. And we're just going to keep on going. So I've got one tail here. I'm going to put one on here for instance. That's another one on that side. So two, four, maybe five on here. And what about another one on here? Okay. So these are my sardines. I've made them, you see. Nothing special. Very simple. You can add, if you want, a little bit more shallots on top. Not too much. Okay. We're going to add a tiny bit of more butter because we love butter everywhere we go. You can use salted butter if you want, by the way, because that's Brittany. It's absolutely allowed. The next step. Juice. Lemon juice. A drizzle of lemon juice on there. You don't want to have too much. You don't want to drown the sardines. Some salt. Okay. Some pepper. And then comes the wine. Now the wine, same thing. I'm going to use a measure here, like a tablespoon measure. This is one tablespoon of wine, you see. And I think maximum for six sardines, I would add one and a half to two tablespoons maximum. And this is because we want to really almost kind of grill the sardines. And now let's talk about the cooking. So here we are. As you can see, the preparation and to layer the sardines in a dish, it's extremely simple. The parsley is going to be chopped at the end. For decoration, you don't put it in the oven. What I've got here are little pan-fried grilled shallots that I'm going to use for the decoration once the dish is cooked. You make it look nice with the parsley. Nice and fresh. For the cooking, this is the tricky part. Usually that has to be cooked in a super hot oven at 250 degrees Celsius. I put the equipment finite on the screen. You need to have the top and bottom element on in your oven or you can use the broiler, which is what I am going to do. The goal here is to really flash cook your sardines with almost like a grill effect. So what I'm going to do is to have the heat coming from above and I'm going to put my tray, not in the middle tray in the oven, but slightly higher near the grill so that in 10 minutes time, I want the shallots to start cooking, the butter to melt, the wine to boil, and the sardines to cook and crisp up. Okay, it's only 10 minutes. So when you cook something like this in a very short amount of time, you need to be really conscious and know your oven. Because if your oven is not strong enough, you're going to boil your sardines, they're going to overcook, they're going to dry up, and the result is not going to be great. So it pays perhaps to do one trial run with the sardines first, see what's best, and when you got the right setting, boom, you do the whole thing. The broiler for me is the best option if you don't have an oven that goes at 250 degrees Celsius. Using the broiler is really an option. So I'm going to put this 10 minutes in the oven and when it's done, I'll show you what it looks like. The sardines are ready, they're just out of the oven, and this is how it looks like. You see, it conserves that nice color on there. It's not grilled, it's almost like braised. 10 minutes was the time it takes. Now if you want, you can take some of the juices, you see the juices at the bottom here, and you can add some on the top, in there, so you get the wine, the lemon juice, and everything. Okay, and what I usually do is just a final decoration every time. Okay, so this is a typical, imagine, Brittany bistro, almost like a little cafe, and I've got here some pieces of burnt shallots that I have made before, that you can use to decorate here and there, and that's going to be it. You can add, if you want, you could add, serve it with a slice of lemon on the side or something like this, maybe two, looks a bit better, and that's about it. You got yourself a delicious little dish. Now I'm not going to kind of go around and take it apart because the sardines, they're not going to look good, but I've tried one before as a test, and that was super delicious. But all in all, as you can see, this is an example of a warm starter you can have in the Atlantic region, in Brittany, and all along the coast, and you can imagine yourself sitting there at a table, staring at the sea, a glass of wine, and you can just enjoy this dish. This is full of taste, and sardines are extremely good for you, so don't waste any time. Go and get some sardines and try the dish.