Pan-fried halibut with wild mushrooms and gnocchi

  • medium
  • 4
  • 1 hour 30 minutes
Not yet rated

Dominic Chapman's pan-fried halibut recipe represents the classic way to serve white fish: complete with a lemon butter sauce, earthy wild mushrooms and crunchy purple sprouting broccoli. The potato gnocchi is a wonderful addition to this seafood meal, bringing in a wonderfully buttery flavour to the rest of the dish.

First published in 2015

Ingredients

Metric

Imperial

Gnocchi

Lemon butter sauce

Pan-fried halibut

Wild mushrooms

Purple sprouting broccoli

Equipment

  • Potato ricer

Method

1
Start on the gnocchi by baking the potatoes in a preheated oven set to 180°C/gas mark 4 for 1 hour or until soft
2
After the potatoes have cooked for 20 minutes, start on the lemon butter sauce by combining the wine, vinegar, thyme, bay and garlic in a saucepan over a medium to high heat and reducing to 200ml
  • 375ml of white wine
  • 100ml of white wine vinegar
  • 5g of thyme
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 3 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
3
Add the cream and bring to a boil. Dice the butter and whisk in to the pan until completely melted. Pass the contents of the pan through a sieve and season and add the lemon juice to taste. Set aside to reheat before serving
4
Remove the potatoes from the oven and scoop out the centres of each. Pass through a ricer and then a fine sieve
5
In a bowl, mix the sieved potatoes, the flour and the whole egg. Season and work into a dough (being careful not to overwork) and then cut dough into 4 pieces
  • 1 egg
  • 200g of plain flour
  • 1 pinch of salt
6
Bring water to a boil in a pan. Roll each piece of dough between cling film into a long sausage and then blanch each sausage for 6 minutes. Refresh in ice cold water. Once cool, remove the cling film and slice each tube of dough into gnocchi parcels
7
Before serving, fry in foaming butter in a pan so that the gnocchi parcels are golden on the outside and light and fluffy in the centre
8
For the halibut, add some oil to a hot pan and lay down each portion of fish in the pan - you may need to pan-fry the fish in batches depending on the size of your pan. Once the fish is golden brown, turn over and add a knob of butter to the pan. Cook until the fish looks golden brown on both sides but still white-ish in the middle
9
Remove each fish from the pan and correct seasoning. Squeeze some lemon juice over each fish and leave to rest for a moment
10
Clean the mushrooms and dry thoroughly. Fry the mushrooms in the butter until golden brown with a pinch of salt. Drain in a colander and add the parsley and Parmesan to the mushrooms in a bowl
11
Remove the hard stalks from the broccoli then blanch in boiling water for two minutes. Season and serve immediately
12
Serve each plate with the halibut, along with the broccoli, mushrooms and gnocchi. Drizzle in the lemon butter sauce

Dominic Chapman's passion for food is in the blood: his family has owned and run the highly acclaimed Castle Hotel in Taunton for over 60 years.

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