Cooking en papillote is a French technique meaning foods are cooked "in a bag." The bag can be parchment paper or as simple as aluminum foil folded up in a nice little package. This method of cooking helps retain the juices, resulting in wonderfully tender fish, and makes for easy kitchen clean up! Watch this video on how to make this delicious Chinese-Style Sea Bass en Papillote in about 15 minutes (plus cooking time), and find the recipe below.
The dish that I’m going to prepare for you now is sea bass en papillote, basically, sea bass in a bag, spring onions and ginger. It’s very simple. We all order it now in Chinese. So all you have to do is spring onions, ginger, a bit of chili, optional. Again, there’s no real recipe, it’s whether you like ginger or you don’t like ginger, a lot of spring onion, a little spring onion. But then you slice it quite fine. And then with the spring onions, carefully cut lengthways, they don’t have to be perfect, can you see, fine but quite coarse. Throw them in a bowl and as you can see I’ve put a couple of spring onions in there, not too much ginger, but let’s not forget the ginger’s still raw. And then some very finely sliced chili, green, red, whatever your preference. As you see I really took it from the bottom end where there’s very few seeds, so you chop from the top end there’s a lot of seeds. So there’s our spring onions, ginger and chili. So here’s my soya sauce. Be quite generous with it. And here’s some chicken stockpot I made earlier just to dilute it to take away the strength. And I always use olive oil. And again it’s to taste, just dilute the soya sauce a little bit and then a little bit of coriander and that’s your sauce. It’s to your flavor, spring onions, ginger, a little bit of chili, optional, chicken stockpot, olive oil and soya sauce.
The reason why I put the chicken stockpot in is to dilute the strength of the soya sauce so it’s not too aggressive for the fish. And take a Knorr stock cube, fish flavor, just crumble it. And then I add a little oil. What I make is a very light paste which I use for seasoning the fish. So there’s our paste. Season the outside of the fish. And the beauty of a paste, it stays where you put it. It doesn’t wash off or drop off. So season the cavity and again on the other side. That’s our sea bass seasoned. We’ve made our sauce, very simple. We’ve seasoned our fish with fish paste. The few spring onions we’ve got left over we’re going to use on the inside. And the bits of ginger we’ve got left over we’re going to use on the inside. (Continue watching here).
Chinese-Style Sea Bass en Papillote
A thumb-sized piece of fresh root ginger
5 spring onions
1/3 of a red chilli (optional)
5 tablespoons Knorr Chicken Stock (made from Knorr Chicken Stock Pot, diluted according to packet instructions)
2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for oiling foil
1 1/2 -3 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce or reduced salt soy sauce (to your taste)
9-10 sprigs of fresh coriander
small amount of Knorr Fish Stock Cube
a whole sea bass (1 kg approx), scaled and gutted
3 1/4 tablespoons dry white wine
