How to Make Bouillabaisse

Chef John Guinivere Bouillabaisse What you want to do in the beginning is get your onions and garlic sauté them and cook it off a little bit of white wine and leave the white wine flavor and then we’ll throw in the tomatoes and get this going but you’ll be surprised how quickly this dish come together. So it will be like sea food here? Myself I would put a bunch of very spicy peppers in it because I like everything hot but the French tend to eat nothing really spicy hot. So we won’t see very many fast French dishes with more than pepper corns in it. They don’t really go for the heat even when they do a curry they like it sweet and just the essence of the curry, no heat, heat. So the sort of a the dish comes from the garlic and the tomatoes and he white wine and the onions and actually proven so sauce would be similar beginning for your soup or your soup base. And one of the most support things when you’re doing a seafood stew is this part it doesn’t really matter how long you cook it for. If it cooks a little bit longer this will going to have the flavors, how long you cook your seafood really matters because I guess from great you know very quickly specially like shrimp, it can either get too chewy or cooking it a little bit longer and it becomes mushy actually. So, get our onions going and we squirt a little bit of olive oil, you could use olive oil or some butter and its actually to get the sautéing going. And I almost always use fresh garlic, I don’t mind the peeled stuff but I definitely don’t like the already crushed stuff. It just got a funny flavor to it. Good way to get your garlic easily peeled just put a little pressure on it and the skin peel right of. And if you want to minced it there is something like this if you use minced, minced is really something you going to cook right away like get all the flavor out of it it’s not going to cook for a long time or maybe it’s a marinade. If you’re doing a stew, this is going to cook for 4 to 6 hours. Throw the whole clove in there or trap it and it’s going to dissolve anyway. So its just no reason to take the time. But if you hate using those or I should say hate cleaning the garlic mincers, you know the presses, one way you can mince your garlic is actually they use the backyard knife so put your handle over the cutting board and you sort of shaving it off is what you’re doing. And you can just bring a knife to it a little bit. And you really can’t use too much garlic for your cooking, don’t be shy if you like it, throw four or five cloves actually and no one will complain, I promise you. You don’t want to let your garlic get real dark because it will get a little bit bitter. So really, when we sauté it we’re just sweating the onions, see a little bit of caramelization which is the sugars are actually in the onions and then if you’re getting close to burning something, that’s when it’s great to grab the wine. It’s sort of like your fire extinguisher for your food. You can use canned tomatoes, use them diced, they usually have plain flavor the only thing you need to think about is they usually have some citric acid in it. So near the end of your dish, check and see how that citric acid worked out and you’ve got you know the acid of wine too. If it’s a little too sour and a little bit of honey and a little sugar bring that bounce out. So you can always count or accent the way till near the end because if you contrary with all those flavors so all the flavors you know work out and then adjust near the end. So, the diced tomatoes of course didn’t proven itself rancid, probably had a cow if I used diced tomatoes. But, there are plenty of flavor in them and they’re actually left on the vine a lot longer than the tomatoes we buy at the supermarket because they aren’t shipped. They pretty much go down the road and real the factory and get chopped up and canned. This is really—overall, this are pretty simple flavors. A major reason you don’t want to put a ton of seasoning and a ton of different herbs and stuff in there is because all these flavors from the seafood is going to come out and that’s where it really makes a little bases to see if the flavor. So, even too much of some thing in there it will overpower the subtle flavors of the seafood. Now, if you’re really classical into cooking and you get your fishbones or you’re in a restaurant, you can make fish stock and if you don’t have a need to make fish stock like I ever made fish stock. Some shrimp bouillon works pretty well and you can usually find this in most of the markets definitely as it once. And you also think of the bullion as your salt. So it’s got plenty of salt in it but it also has a chervil flavor so if you add it and you know it’s salty enough, then you’re pretty much at the same level you want to be salt and flavor wise at the same time. If you tried the salt and then make up with the shrimp flavor, you’d be too salty in other words. You’re really looking for pretty much the soup I’ve got right there and I’m going to add all the seafood, all at the very end all at once and then it just going to take a couple of minutes to cook. Because everything is going to be approximately the same size and take some about a time. In that way we don’t over cook anything. Now the shrimp I left the—they’re deveined but I left the shells on. For two reasons, it gives you something to do while they’re heating just all those flavor in the shells so it’s another good flavor to add a little base. This is will serve a big dinner. This is actually a good one you can make on the beach too. Put everything in. I generally put a white fish in and like the salt like a cod or lingcod. But what I saw at the market today, I didn’t like. So I thought well, this one looks nice and fresh so I’ll use that. And you could see in there that the shrimp are already turning pink. It cooks pretty quickly. So put that under for a little bit. Keep the heat in and it’s pretty good. Season with a little bit of pepper and take all of this green onion for garnish here. it’s always nice to finish a little something off with an imposing colors, usually we add I—I was watching a TV commercial last night for Albertsons and they had asparagus. And they just put it on a green plate. Hey, we do better than that but the choice while I know you get some red wine and simmer it a little bit of bread for your green onions in there and you have a pretty done quick little Bouillabaisse. You like some I got extra. So I think I made a Bouillabaisse once again.