Business Times - 14 Feb 2009
GUEST CHEF
Seafood specialist
Giovanni Speciale shares how to pick and cook the best seafood to make a splash at your table. By Audrey Phoon
HAVING grown up in the 'heel' of boot-shaped Italy, Giovanni Speciale knows food like the back of his foot. After all, Puglia, the region that the chef is from, is framed by olive groves and three seas, and it supplies nearly all of the country's olive oil and pasta. In addition to starting his career at a two-Michelin-star restaurant there, the Italian has also worked in a vast number of other food-focused locales, from Alexandria and the Maldives to Sydney, Bangkok and Hong Kong.
Cooking in so many close-to-coastal areas has made the aptly-named Speciale a seafood specialist. And that's one of the skill sets he brought to The Regent Singapore when he moved here to be its executive chef last month. It could be our imagination, but at Basilico, the hotel's Italian restaurant that is Speciale's pet focus, the fish at the buffet tables looked perkier than usual when we visited a couple of weeks ago, and the prawns had their tails curled up in an almost jaunty manner.
If you want the seafood at your table to look just as cheerful, Speciale suggests mentally ticking off a checklist before you make your purchases: the eyes of fish must be 'bright and clear, while the gills must be very red and almost bleeding', he says, adding that 'the texture must also be very firm, the scales must not be coming out and the tailfins must be open'.
For prawns, the tail area should not be black. 'And in the case of blue prawns, the neck veins must be very blue,' shares the chef. 'I also like to smell seafood before I buy it because it's very important to use the senses to judge. Also, taking it all in is part of the experience - the smell and flavour starts to go to your head and from there you can figure out how you want to cook it.'
Different types of fish also need different seasoning, so find out where your fish is from before you use it in a recipe, says Speciale. He cites fish from the Mediterranean Sea as an example - they're 'very salty so you don't need much salt with it; all that's needed is a simple sea salt crust made with egg white (such as in the recipe here)' with organic vegetables on the side which the chef likes to use because they have 'no spots and are firm and bright'. They're also not too overpowering, he adds.
South-east Asian fish, on the other hand, don't have as much flavour because the 'water here is warm and not so salty', so such fish can be cooked with more robust accompaniments.
Bear in mind, though, that too much seasoning takes the focus away from the main product, which is a waste when you're using quality ingredients, advises the chef. 'Concentrate on the product itself and take care of it as you would a baby,' he says, stressing that as many parts of each ingredient as possible should be used. 'Fish can be expensive, so aside from cooking the flesh you can also use the bones, head and tail to make a soup, for example.'
Although Speciale misses Italian produce from his hometown - 'it was very good quality and easy to get', he says - he is happy with the selection in Singapore. One place that he recommends for authentic Italian products is Italian Food & Wine (www.italianfoodwine.com, Tel 6323-3203) at Craig Road. 'They sell some specific, good-quality food from Italy,' explains the chef. 'It's not a big variety but still they have about 30 kinds of pasta, not in the usual shapes, extra virgin olive oil ... refined stuff.'
It's food like that, plus seafood and vegetables, that are 'very important', states Speciale. 'They make for lighter and fresher meals, so you don't have to work out for three hours after that!'
Seabass slowly cooked in a sea salt crust with lemon oil
Serves 4
Ingredients:
4 fillets wild seabass each weighing about 130g
Zest of 1 lemon
400g sea salt
2 egg whites
Lemon oil (recipe below)
Extra virgin olive oil to cook
1 green zucchini, sliced and grilled
1 yellow zucchini, sliced and grilled
4 Pachino cherry tomatoes, roasted with basil
2 stalks asparagus, shaved and blanched
1 stalk baby leek, sliced and blanched
4 sprigs chervil
2 sprigs baby fennel, blanched
6 roasted pistachios
4 pods snow peas
Method
1. With a knife, create small incisions between the skin and the flesh of the seabass, then insert diced bits of lemon zest into the incisions. Set aside in a tray.
2. Mix the sea salt and egg whites together, then pour over the fish.
3. Bake at 110 degrees Celsius for 14 minutes, until sea-salt-and-egg-white mixture forms a crust around the fish.
4. Slow cook the remaining lemon zest in 200ml of extra virgin olive oil for 90 minutes at 45 degrees Celsius.
5. Toss the zucchini, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, baby leek, chervil, baby fennel, pistachios and snow peas in 2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil.
6. Remove the salt crust from the seabass.
7. Portion out vegetables into 4 servings, put each serving on a plate with 1 seabass fillet and drizzle everything with lemon oil.
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