About this recipe
While I was an apprentice chef at the Watermark restaurant in Sydney, the kitchen brigade took turns on who would create the fish of the day offering. The best fish dishes often sold out by the middle of service. Although this dish is not one of the specials we created, it is rather similar in presentation and style to those we prepared many years ago.
This is an interesting twist on the regular pesto and instead of using pine nuts I’ve used macadamia nuts. It uses the same ingredients like basil, olive oil, rocket, parsley and parmesan cheese which you’d use in regular pesto, but the macadamia nuts offer a really intense roasted nuts flavour to the macadamia nut pesto.
Ingredients
4 × 250g (8.8 oz.) snapper fillets
450g (1 pound) potatoes
15g (1 tablespoon) wildfire spice
100g (½ cup) fresh rocket leaves
100g (½ cup) fresh basil leaves
100g (½ cup) macadamia nuts
150g (.6 cup) freshly grated parmesan cheese
50g (¼ cup) Italian parsley
100ml (½ cup) light olive oil
5g (1 teaspoon) salt
Sprig of watercress for garnish
30g (2 tablespoon) butter
Cooking instruction
First, peel the potatoes and bring them to the boil in small pot with a little salt. When cooked, strain the potatoes and coarsely mash them with a little butter and Wildfire Spice. Salt if required. Allow to cool slightly and form into hash-brown sized patties. Then in a frying pan melt a little the butter and panfry the hash browns until golden, remove and finish in a hot oven.
For the pesto, place the macadamia nuts, rocket, parsley, basil, parmesan cheese adding a little olive oil to form a paste like consistently. Then add salt to taste.
Ensure the snapper of is free of all bones and in another sauce pan heat a little butter and pan fry the snapper till golden brown on medium heat. Remove from the heat, just as the snapper is nearly cooked, as it will continue to cook while still in the pan.
To serve, place the hash brown on the plate, then the snapper fillets then simply garnish with the macadamia nut pesto and a sprig of watercress.