Pomegranate is one of the most beautiful ingredients you can use for your preparations
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 7 € pp)
- salt
- 4 bass filets with the skin
- EV olive oil (gentle, neutral otherwise EV sunflower oil)
- 1 pomegranate
- 16 almonds
- fresh mint
I love the colors of the Middle Eastern cuisine. Visually, it may be the most attractive of all cuisines. Turmeric and other spices, pistachios, dried apricots and figs, peppers of all colours, persimmons, pomegranate and many other ingredients take part of creations which are more like paintings than dishes. Just take a look inside Ottolenghi´s books to get mesmerized by his work.
Pomegranate is a very strange fruit. It has hundreds of seeds inside very juicy cells. It can be used in many ways as a salad ingredient, a rice topping etc. Today, we will use it along with filets of European sea bass, one of the tastiest fish of the Mediterranean sea.
Sea bass is farmed commercially in Europe, so its price is not always high. I usually buy organic farmed sea basses, which cost about 16 Euros per kg and I use their fillets and their caps too, preparing with them fish soups or stocks.
So, we tell our fish seller to prepare for us 4 sea bass filets (about 200 g each) and we lightly salt them. We preheat the oven at 160 C degrees. We also preheat some oil in a skillet and we fry the filets for just 2 minutes, only from the skinned part. We place the skillet in the oven and we bake for about 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, we peel and lightly roast the almonds and we cut them in halves. We also remove the seeds from the pomegranate.
When the filets are done, we put them on plates, we add pomegranate seeds, some almonds, chopped fresh mint and more olive oil, if we like, and we serve.
