Looking for an easy weeknight dinner? 11-19: Oven-Baked Red Snapper will remind you of the all-too-familiar crunchy oven-baked chicken, but with a lighter fishy twist. If you find yourself with some fish filets (red snapper not required), give this one a try.
Another way to look at this: a more elegant presentation of fish sticks. 🐟
Note that the TIPS section suggests using fish bouillon (or chicken/veggie if the fish kind is hard to come by) instead of white wine if you would rather not use or don’t have wine/alcohol.
Ingredients. I didn’t have fresh tomatoes, so canned diced ones will have to do. My fish filets are some rockfish filets instead of the suggested red snapper, but they indicate that any similar type will work. I thought Italian-seasoned panko breadcrumbs would go nicely with the flavors of this dish, so I used those as well.
There’s one more component I decided just to add on my own–the roasted garlic you see on top of the tomato can.
Why the roasted garlic? Since I’m using canned/diced tomatoes, I need to perk them up a bit. I thought a bruschetta/chunky tomato sauce with some strong flavors like roasted garlic and capers would go well with the very plainly-seasoned fish.
I already pre-roasted the garlic and froze the bulbs–I pull one out each time I need one. They defrost pretty well, and popping the cloves out is really easy. Instead of hard and acidic, the roasted cloves are soft and mild.
I pulled capers and onions out to add–the onions will get processed with the tomatoes and garlic, but I’ll add the capers in after to keep them from turning into mush.
After processing.
Stirring in herbs and capers. Notice it’s not a purée–it’s important to keep it somewhat chunky.
Cleaned out the mini-processor and used it to cream the butter and egg yolk.
Decided to make XO green beans as my side dish after grabbing a jar of the sauce on a recent trip to the local international grocery store.
I blistered my green beans and then sautéed them with the XO sauce. It’s supposed to have hoisin sauce in there as well, but this is enough of a sodium bomb as it is.
Trimmed the fish filets into more evenly sized pieces.
Put some of my tomato sauce under the filets, but also saved some for topping the filets later.
Creaming the butter and egg yolk.
Spreading the topping on each filet.
After layering on the bread crumbs and dotting with the remaining butter.
I poured the white wine around the fish as instructed. This is after the first baking period–when the recipe said to add their version of tomatoes, I added the rest of the tomato sauce to finish it off. I didn’t start it with the tomato sauce because I wanted the filets to get crispy.
After baking. Looks pretty good! The sauce underneath would be great on pasta–just a suggestion.
I went leaner with mine and served it alongside my XO beans–a decent dinner as Simply Delicious goes.
Grade: A-
