Black cod

I’m feeling excited. The cold Easter holidays have turned into warm spring sunshine revealing new colours - blue sky, green leaves unfurling, and white pink blossoms.

Lockdown is lifting and people are seizing the moment to take much needed breaks from a long winter of working at home (aka living at work) and I have suddenly been inundated with private chef requests across the Cotswolds.

This weekend I’m cooking two Japanese tasting menus near Lechlade on Friday and Stow on the Wold on Saturday. It is the first time in more than a year that I’ve placed a fish order worth more than £30.

2.6kg Alaska Black Cod (peeler just for scale)

Last night I was teaching one of my signature dishes, spicy peanut miso aubergine, as part of an online corporate teambuilding class. A basic miso marinade (miso paste diluted with sake and mirin) always features in my classes as a key building block of Japanese cooking. It can be used in so many recipes from nasu dengaku, to glazing barbecued pork belly or curing and marinating fish.

Perhaps most famous is Nobuyuki Matsuhisa’s signature dish, black cod with miso - a dish that I first cooked in the early 2000s. There are just three ingredients listed on page 124 of ‘Nobu The Cookbook’: black cod, saikyo miso and hajikami. On page 172 his recipe for saikyo miso includes sake, mirin, white miso and a lot of white sugar. He doesn’t specify how much sake, which troubles anyone who likes to follow a recipe precisely.

I have modified my own miso marinade recipe to include less sugar, but it depends not so much on your personal tastes but what type of miso, and most of all, mirin, you are using. High quality, artisanal mirin is a natural product containing only rice, water and cultured rice. The commercially produced version is synthesised cocktail of up to ten ingredients, mostly glucose (and sometimes fructose or corn) syrup - check the label on the back, not just what it says on the front.

However you make your miso marinade, the biggest determinant of success in cooking Nobu’s recipe is getting hold of black cod. Asked to cook a Japanese lunch last week with less than two days notice, I was unable to get black cod in time to give it the required time curing in miso, so I used plain old Atlantic cod. My client enjoyed their lunch but noted that the cod was ‘a bit dry’ - and they were right - the cod in miso looked great, as the sugars in the mirin had caramelised, but to get it to that stage, I had overcooked the fish. A bad workman blames his tools…

Black cod is not a cod. Aka sablefish, it is caught in the North Pacific (fishing area 67) off the Alaskan coast. As the fish mature, they live deeper in the ocean and develop a high oil content, which makes it more sympathetic to my heavy handed cooking and results in sweet, unctuous and velvety flakes of fish.

Black cod arrives with the head and guts removed, frozen solid in a protective glaze of ice. When I first enquired about it with my nearest fishmonger, they would only supply a minimum of 20kg, which is about 7-8 fish of 2-3kg.

Each fish typically yields around 12-14 portions - and even at wholesale prices of around £30/kg, that’s around £6.50 per portion, perhaps up to £10 at retail prices of £40-£50/kg. With a typical restaurant markup of 3-4 times and VAT, you’re unlikely to find black cod for less than £25 (at the time of writing, it costs £39.50 at Nobu on Park Lane).

When I first received black cod direct from the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute I was keen to put it on the menu at my restaurant, but to make it affordable, I had to reduce the portion size to 90-100g (main course portions would usually be 140-170g). And even then, I offered it at a subsidised mark up.

One customer remarked how our black cod tasted very different to the dish they had at The Ivy. Alarm bells were ringing in my ears, in particular when they mentioned they had paid less than £20 for a portion. Intrigued, I looked up the dish on menu and discovered rather cynical menu writing.

Caveat emptor: “blackened cod” is not the same as ‘black cod’ - it is simply cod that has been ‘blackened’ (whatever that is) with a liberal spattering of Asian clichés and a glazed veneer of cultural appropriation.

Have you cooked black cod?

What’s your recipe for miso marinade?

And what do you think ‘blackened’ cod is?