Black Cod With Miso

In my weekly email from the NY Times, I spotted a link to an article by the Minimalist entitled, “The Minimalist Chooses 25 of His Favorites“. I clicked on it, and was delighted to find a convenient listing of 25 of Mark Bittman’s favourite recipes. I proceeded to click through a bunch of the linked recipes and print out a good number of them.

One of the recipes I printed was for Black Cod Broiled With Miso. The ingredients in the recipe look more or less the same as in most miso cod recipes, but what sets the recipe apart is that it does not call for any lengthy marination of the cod. (And this, of course, is consistent with Mark Bittman’s column, which promotes cooking simply and well. ) Most other recipes ask you to marinate the cod for a few hours or a few days before baking it.

Since I managed to find this beautiful black cod at Sakuraya (which, by the way, is my all-time favourite Japanese restaurant in Singapore) two days ago, I decided to make the dish last night. And it was delish!

Before I give you the recipe, here are two tips:

1) Use the Correct Oven Setting

You will want to use the grill or barbecue setting on your oven, and position your oven rack to the upper position.

If you have a basic Ariston oven like I do, set it to barbecue mode, and move your rack to Position 4:

2) Serve the Cod Sans Sauce

I suggest that after you remove the cod from the oven, you use a silicon spatula to gently brush off the sauce before serving the fish. As you can see from my pictures, I served the fish with some sauce over it – mostly because I felt kind of bad throwing all that sauce away – but it really wasn’t necessary to do so. The sauce is very sweet and piquant – great for cooking the fish in, not so great for serving the fish in. (It does, however, go really well with steamed veggies, so feel free to serve it on the side if you like.)

So here, with some minor tweaks, is my take on the Minimalist’s Black Cod with Miso.

Black Cod With Miso

(Adapted from The Minimalist’s Black Cod Broiled With Miso)

(Click here for printable recipe.)

Ingredients (serves 4):

1. Position oven rack to the upper position. Pre-heat oven to 200 degC.

2. Heat sugar, miso and mirin in a small pot over low-medium heat, stirring often until all the miso has been mixed in well. (You should not see clumps of miso in the sauce.) Remove from heat.

3. Put cod fillets in a nonstick baking pan, spoon half the sauce over the fish, and put the pan in the oven. After 6 minutes, spoon remaining sauce over the fish and bake for another 6 minutes. Serve immediately.