Divya: Hi, I’m Divya Gugnani and welcome to Tao in midtown Manhattan, a hip multi-level destination with trendy cuisine and chic cocktails. Here shoppers and tycoons alike come for the lively ambiance and Asian bites so let’s go behind the burner and meet the chef.
Divya: I’m here with your chef John Villa. John, I see swordfish in front of me. What are you making?
John: We are making Teppanyaki Swordfish with the tempura asparagus and Ponzu butter. We’ll be making sure we have a good piece of swordfish and the best way to tell that’s from the bloodline. You want to see it nice, red blood line and nice firm fish as we have here and all we’re going to do is cut right off the skin. You also bore when you're cutting fish. You want to have a sharp knife.
Divya: Right.
John: We’re going to grab some pepper and some ginger. We’ll just throw right in there, the oil. I’m using grape seed oil in it and cilantro as well. And actually I'm going to throw yuzu juice. Yuzu is a Japanese lime but it has a flavor also and I love using it a lot. We’re going to put a little when it’s in here. It will cook the fish and just like the cilantro.
So, you only want to marinade this for maybe half an hour. And from here we’re going to sear it and what we can do is we can also start making our Ponzu butter. Ponzu butter is very simply Ponzu of course and with a Kombu searing, I just set the Ponzu reduced down until it’s almost syrup and just before we get to that we start at the butter one piece at a time.
We have a lovely green asparagus and most important thing with asparagus you want them firm. You don’t want them dry you want them full of water in it so you cut it lengthwise. This basically is tempura flour and we mix it with cold soda and all we’re going to do, we’re going to coat the tempura and then crispy fry it. Cook over to just brighten up make a it a lot lighter and a lot crispier.
The most important thing when we sear the fish, we want a hot grill, take a little bit of oil, season the fish with salt and pepper, fresh ground pepper, sea salt don’t use iodized salt and you want to make sure you sear it at all sides. A little bit of oil and we want to sear it on the outside depending at the thickness of this fish. You don’t want to go maybe a minute or two on each side and maybe 2 minutes in the oven.
The temperature is about 350 to 400 degrees and you can see the golden brown color on the outside and if you just touch it, it’s like cooking your steak.
You can use a small deep fryer or any kind of pot with oil, make sure you splash it away from yourself and it’s tempura you want to kind of lightly drop it in. You just want to fry this so it’s crispy and golden brown. It does not take long. If you just want to take it out, drain it on a towel, of course Kosher salt, a little fresh cracked pepper and so it’s good to go.
Divya: Perfect. So, we’re slicing. You can see it’s cooked around the edges and the center is raw.
John: Exactly. We’re going to fan it out real nice and the tempura of asparagus and we’ll just take our Ponzu butter which we made before and just drizzle a little of it and we garnish the top a little bit of chive flowers.
Divya: I’m ready to eat. Let’s go do it.
John: That’s something that’s well with you. I think they all cut through that citrus and the butter, just a great combination, something different in doing wine. You can chair with a chardoney and similar to that.
Divya: So, John, thank you so much for having us here at Tao at table 69 with your delectable swordfish.
John: Thank you for having me.
Divya: On Behind the Burner you can enjoy this exclusive opportunity to purchase fine seafood. Stay tune to Behind the Burner where we give the tips, tricks and techniques that are lighting the culinary world on fire.
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