Fernand Point Sole Dugléré

Previously, on tastingmenu.wordpress.com
* https://tastingmenu.wordpress.com/2023/04/15/savory-custards/

The other night, my better half prepared fried dover sole fillets that were seasoned with 4:1 salt/pepper mix which was subsequently dredged in flour and just fried at about 4 minutes a side on medium heat.  The accompaniment to that meal was blanched asparagus and tartar sauce (as she requested).  But it made me think about how else I could prepare the sole.  As I browsed through my copy of The New Legal Seafoods Cookbook, I came upon the Easy Baked Sole recipe (p. 162).  Looking at it more closely, less the parmesan (parmagiano) cheese and the garlic, this recipe reminded me something I had recently seen. 

For two portions, the Legal Seafoods recipe ingredients list appeared to be:

• 3/4 to 1 lb of sole fillets
• 2 T butter
• 1/2 tomato (peeled, seeded, chopped (about 1/3 c))
• 1 T chopped fresh basil or 1/2 T chopped fresh marjoram or chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 minced garlic (grated?)
• 1 T grated parmesan (parmagiano-reggiano)

Basically, this recipe started by making a compound butter in a sauce pan where the garlic, tomato would be added, cooked for about 30 seconds and then the cheese and herbs would be stirred in.  Each fillet would be annointed with the butter mixture and folded over onto itself and  placed into buttered baking dish. The prepared fillets would be cooked in a 375 degree F preheated oven for about 13 minutes.  After the fillets were plated, the baking juices would be reduced down into a sauce.

This recipe seemed suspiciously familiar. Sure enough, it was Chef Thomas Keller’s take on Chef Point’s Ma Gastronomie Sole Duglere that I had once encountered. That online recipe can be found here:

(https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/dover-sole-duglere.html)
Alternatively here:
(http://web.archive.org/web/20120419203800/https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/dover-sole-duglere.html)

So I thought I’d continue the exploration of Chef Point’s culinary point of view and his influence on today’s cuisine. As I understand it, the original sole duglere looked something like this:
(https://app.ckbk.com/recipe/esco04831c06s005ss001r019/1881-sole-duglere)

It seemed to me that Chef Point/Chef Keller really stripped the recipe down to its bare essentials. One detail that’s not completely described in the Point/Keller write up is the type of tomato used. Fortunately there’s some guidance at: https://food52.com/blog/19855-the-abcs-of-french-cooking-in-one-fish-recipe suggesting the use of roma and not beefsteak tomatoes.

So a single portion of Chef Point’s recipe would probably be:

a tablespoon of parsley leaves stripped from stems

estimating that 1 1/2 T of unsalted butter

6oz skinless sole or flounder fillets, rinsed and patted dry
Salt and pepper (and in the case of Chef Keller, white pepper)
1 1/2 tablespoons butter, cut into slabs
1 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 medium roma tomatoes (3oz?), diced (blot excess tomato liquid with paper towels).

blanched roma, peeled than diced

diced tomatoes ‘concasse’, blotted dry

To prepare the recipe:

• I needed to preheat the oven to 350 degree F.
• then season the skinless fillet by sprinkling over salt and pepper; without guidance from the NYTimes article, I would rely on Chef Ron Siegel’s sensebilities and here use a 12:1 mix of salt/white pepper here (see appendix)

was shocked that neither Whole Foods, Wegmans, Hmart nor Sakanaya had sole/hirame! Only Star Markets did!

sole fillets blotted dry and seasoned with the 2 3-fingered pinches salt/white pepper mix per fillet

• To prepare the cooking ‘vessel’, on the bottom of an ovenproof dish, I would layer a line of butter slabs and then add the parsley and tomato along the top of the slabs.

portioning out the thin slabs of butter

scattering the parsley above the butter slabs

spreading the tomato concasse across the butter/parsley

• I’d finally place the fish fillets across the top of the layer of butter, parsley and tomato.

layering the sole on top of the butter and vegetables

ovenproof plate ready for the oven

• Now I just needed to cover the top of the dish, and cook for 15 minutes, until the fish turned opaque/white.

hmm – out of oven and doesn’t seem quite done

So after the 15 minutes, I got the fish out of the over and took a look. The fish had just started to turn opaque/white; but it wasn’t to my liking. So I turned up the heat to 375 and put it in for another 7 minutes. I suspect the reason it wasn’t quite cooked through might have been because of the ceramic thickness of my ovenproof revol plates.

• Now it was a matter of transferring the fish with a slotted spoon to a plate and spooning the tomato and parsley onto the fish.

Now that fish looks more like it’s ready and across the fillets went the parsley/tomato mixture (carefully leaving the butter in the cooking plate)

• But I needed to cover the plated fish to keep it warm because I needed to transform the ‘cooking juices’ into a sauce.

transferring the butter mixture into a sauce pot to cook.

• To do that, Chef Keller mentioned quickly reducing the butter ‘sauce’ from the baking dish into a small saucepan on high heat. At this point, it was really just about cooking off any excess tomato water. 

In retrospect, I think I was in a little bit of a hurry because I was hungry. Properly done, as Chef Thomas Keller always advises, I should’ve strained out the vegetables first before placing them across the fish so that I could have, essentially, a pure reduction liquid to work with. Clearly that would be note to self not to forget that step.

an apparently completed reduction

While the instructions said to do the reduction over high heat, I worried that this wasn’t clarified butter. I was worried I was going to run the risk of turning this into a beurre noisette or even burning the butter (yuck!). So I stopped when I saw the full head of boiling bubbles in the sauce pot.

• Now I could just pour the reduction over the fish and serve immediately.

And so I garnished the dish with a bit blanched bok choy whose flavor would contrast the richness of the butter cooked sole.

Just before spooning on the butter sauce reduction

As it would turn out, I would NOT need all the sauce from the sauce pot. It seemed that 3 T of the reduction was more than sufficient (a little restraint was good here).

Fernand Point’s Sole Dugléré from Ma Gastronomie as interpreted by Chef Thomas Keller

Upon tasting the dish, I was a little worried I would get a mouthful of butter, but the butter sauce, though rich in flavor, was actually quite light. I could actually taste all the elements in the dish and the tomato ‘persillade’ provided a fresh vegetal contrast along with the slight bitterness of the blanched baby bok choy. As I tasted the fish, tomato/parsley in combination with the butter ‘sauce’ it seemed the seasoned fish provided enough salt/white pepper to brighten the dish. The texture on the cooked sole was still firm and not mushy (aka overcooked) to the touch.

If I get the chance, I’d like to get my hands on dover sole to make this recipe again instead of the grey sole that I got on this occasion. I found it interesting that the amount of butter ‘sauce’ used here and the amount of butter used in mustard herb compound butter per serving was between the 1 1/2 to 3 T range. I have to wonder if the happy medium in regards to Chef Point’s amount of sauce/serving is in the 2 T range when you take into also account his Bohemian Lobster recipe as interpreted by Chef Keller. Chef Keller, Mr. Bittman, thank you kindly for making this recipe available to all of us. I must say it was quite a delicious learning experience.

Appendix
In regards to the 12:1 salt/white pepper mix, the math suggests the smallest possible mixture/yield is:
1/2 T salt (1 t+1/2 t)
1/8 t white pepper

measuring out the seasoning for the sole

what the seasoning mix should look like