For 15-20 servings: 1.2 kg turbot fillet, salt, white pepper, 2 tbsp lemon juice, 2 tsp Dijon mustard, 150 g leaf spinach (preferably large leaves), 200 g toast, 3/8 l whipping cream, 2 egg whites, 50 g chopped shallots, 50 g soft butter, 3 bunches chives, 1 black truffle of approx. 25 g, nutmeg.
Garnish: 6 raw lobster crabs, 1 bunch dill, 1 untreated lemon, 1 tsp cumin.
Mustard cream made from 1/8 l whipping cream and 3 tbsp Dijon mustard.
Season 700 g turbot fillet with salt, pepper, lemon juice and mustard. Clean and wash spinach, blanch in boiling salted water and immediately place in ice water. Cut remaining turbot fillet into strips; soak crustless toast in a mixture of 1/8 l cream and the egg white. Sauté shallots in 1 tablespoon butter until translucent. Cut chives into small rolls, peel and dice truffles. Lift the spinach out of the ice water, drain well and spread out on kitchen paper. Wrap the seasoned turbot fillets in the spinach leaves. Grease a 2 litre tureen dish with butter. Put the soaked and well squeezed bread with the marinated turbot strips and the steamed shallots twice through the fine slice of the meat grinder, season with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg. Mix in the chives and truffles, chill the farce. Whip the rest of the cream until stiff and fold into the farce. Fill half of it into the tureen; bump the form several times on the work surface so that no air bubbles form. Place the turbot parcels on top of the farce and cover with the rest of the farce, again bumping the dish firmly and closing it with the lid. Cook the dish in a water bath in the oven at 100° for 1 hour. Remove and refrigerate overnight, covered with a board and weighted down with a tin, on a rack. The next day, hold the dish briefly in hot water and carefully turn out onto a nice platter.
Bring water to a boil with dill, lemon slices, cumin and salt and let the lobster crabs steep in it for 5 minutes. Break them out of their shells, cut them lengthwise (removing the intestines) and decorate the terrine with them, adding dill tips. Whip the cream until stiff, stir in the mustard and serve with the terrine.
The king of flat fish
.
"Take the butt and leave the flounder", says a poem by Theodor Fontane, and the better choice would indeed be this. After all, among the flatfishes the boneless flounder (after dab and plaice) is considered the least; the delicate, often underestimated halibut reaches the most impressive size; but rightly the most sought-after, even before sole, is the turbot. It has been called the "pheasant of the sea". The king of the shallow fish is named after the hard bumps on the dark side of its eyes, which feel like small stones.
At Venos turbot can be bought live or slaughtered. Whereby wild ones from Holland and Scandinavia are difficult to distinguish from farmed ones from Spain. This is the opinion of father and son Kosmidis, who founded the company six years ago.
You have to know the fish well to be able to taste the meat of a wild turbot as opposed to a farmed fish. The colouring of the skin does not say much, since it adapts to its respective environment.
The noble turbot is not a cheap fish, it costs live and from wild catch clearly more than hundred euro per kilo; already slaughtered is cheaper. In any case, you get the whole butt for it and its supposed waste is good for a lot. Never has the market leader succeeded in making a better fish soup than the one made from the head and bones of a huge turbot!
The fish's lean, fine, snow-white flesh remains firm enough for solid dishes, fried turbot fillets with mashed potatoes and lentils and bacon sauce, for example. Beyond that, there's a whole range of festive preparations, and one of them, turbot terrine with truffles, could be pencilled in for the next festive occasion.
There's reason to visit Venos after that, too, around January. By then, the fish department will have been remodeled and enlarged in the style of a southern market hall. Venos customers include renowned Greek and Italian restaurants, which can find a full range of foreign foods here, with an emphasis on southern European specialties. The house's best reference, meanwhile, has been Japanese customers, who are known to make no compromises when it comes to the freshness of fish. More and more private customers who like fine food are finding their way to Venos, Thomas Kosmidis can identify many cooking bankers among them.
And the family - the mother Croatian, the father Greek, the son raised in Germany - wants to invite to an international competition in pizza baking soon. Against xenophobia.
VENOS
Evgenios and Thomas Kosmidis
Rödelheimer Landstr. 75-85
60487 Frankfurt am Main-Rödelheim
Tel.: 069-9710130, Fax: 97101334
Internet: <link http: www.venos.de _blank>www.venos.de
Mo-Fri 8am-6pm, Sat 8am-4pm
from Waldemar Thomas