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FISH

RECIPE: All you need this summer is this Swedish fish dish

Summer means light food and light food means fish. Luckily, food writer John Duxbury knows exactly what to do about that. Here is a great recipe for how to bake brill and since it's also asparagus season, this healthy vegetable would make a nice side dish.

Published: 2 June 2017 06:59 CEST
RECIPE: All you need this summer is this Swedish fish dish
Baked brill with asparagus, potato, dill and lemon. Photo: Swedish Food

Swedes normally bake medium-sized fish, such as arctic char, and large flat fish, such as brill and turbot, very slowly. To quote from Vår Kok Bok, Sweden's top-selling cookery book, “The skin dries and protects the flesh, sealing in the flavour…”

Though brill availability is limited due to overfishing, it can easily be substituted by turbot for example. In fact, both are so closely related that they sometimes interbreed. Brill is slightly less meaty than turbot, though sweeter, and has a wonderful texture. 

Summary

Makes: 2-4 servings

Level: Very Easy

Preparation: 5 minutes

Cooking: 55 minutes/kg

TOTAL: 1-2 hours

Tips

– Allow about 350 g (12 oz), per person, so a small 700 g (1½ lb) fish will serve 2. A medium sized fish of about 1.5kg (3 lb), will serve 4.

– When choosing brill, look for bright eyes, but don’t worry about the colour of the skin as this depends on where they are caught, ranging from light brown on sandy sea floors to dark, rich chocolate-brown on muddy substrates.

– You can use hot horseradish sauce if you can't get fresh horseradish. (Fresh horseradish will keep for several weeks in a fridge if wrapped in clingfilm.)

– Serve the fish quite simply with boiled or steamed potatoes, melted or brown butter, freshly grated horseradish and a few steamed vegetables or a salad.

Ingredients

1 whole brill, cleaned

30g (2tbsp) butter per person

2 tbsp freshly grated horseradish per person

lemon wedges, optional

dill springs, optional

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 100°C (210°F, gas ¼, fan 100°C).

2. Weigh the fish and calculate the cooking time based on 55 minutes/kg (25 minutes/lb), or a minimum of 50 minutes.

3. Rinse the fish and then dry with paper towels.

4. Place in the pan, dark side upwards, and roast for the calculated time. (Don’t add any liquid, butter or oil.)

5. While the fish is cooking, melt the butter slowly. Skim off all the froth from the surface. You will then see a clear yellow layer on top of a milky layer. Discard the milky residue and use the rest. Carefully pour into a hot sauce boat and keep warm until required. (If you prefer beurre noisette (brown butter), follow the recipe below.)

6. At the end of the calculated cooking time, check that the fish is cooked by pushing the tip of a round-ended knife through the thickest part of the flesh until it touches the backbone, then lever it gently to one side. If the fish is cooked it should come away from the backbone easily and the flesh should be white and opaque. (If you have a temperature probe, the temperature of the thickest part should be 55C-58C (131-136F).)

7. Serve the fish straight from the roasting pan by making a cut in the skin along the backbone, remove the skin and serve the fillets on to hot plates. Top the fillets with grated horseradish, pour over a little of the juices from the pan and some melted or brown butter and garnish as desired. Serve the remaining melted or brown butter in a sauce boat along with a dish of grated horseradish.

Beurre noisette

If you prefer to serve the fish with beurre noisette (brown butter) it is fairly easy to do if you follow the tips below. The idea is that the butter is heated a little past its melting point, which results in the milk solids in the butter browning and creating a wonderful nutty aroma.

1. Heat a thick bottomed saucepan on medium heat. Add the butter cut into slices or cubes so that it heats evenly and all the butter melts at the same time.

2. Once the butter has melted whisk it frequently. It will produce quite a lot of white foam initially, but then the foam will begin to subside.

3. Continue whisking and heating the butter, but watching it carefully. Lightly browned specks will begin to form at the bottom of the pan and it will give off a gorgeous nutty aroma.

4. Once the butter is a rich golden colour and has a nice nutty aroma, remove the butter from the heat to stop it from cooking any more, and pour it carefully into a warmed sauce boat, discarding the residues.

Butter is easy to brown provided you watch it carefully and keep whisking it. If you neglect it and end up overcooking it, so that the butter becomes black, I am afraid you will have to discard it and start again!

This recipe is published courtesy of John Duxbury, founder and editor of Swedish Food.

FOOD AND DRINK

OPINION: Are tips in Sweden becoming the norm?

Should you tip in Sweden? Habits are changing fast thanks to new technology and a hard-pressed restaurant trade, writes James Savage.

Published: 5 April 2024 13:59 CEST
OPINION: Are tips in Sweden becoming the norm?

The Local’s guide to tipping in Sweden is clear: tip for good service if you want to, but don’t feel the pressure: where servers in the US, for instance, rely on tips to live, waiters in Sweden have collectively bargained salaries with long vacations and generous benefits. 

But there are signs that this is changing, and the change is being accelerated by card machines. Now, many machines offer three preset gratuity percentages, usually starting with five percent and going up to fifteen or twenty. Previously they just asked the customer to fill in the total amount they wanted to pay.

This subtle change to a user interface sends a not-so-subtle message to customers: that tipping is expected and that most people are probably doing it. The button for not tipping is either a large-lettered ‘No Tip’ or a more subtle ‘Fortsätt’ or ‘Continue’ (it turns out you can continue without selecting a tip amount, but it’s not immediately clear to the user). 

I’ll confess, when I was first presented with this I was mildly irked: I usually tip if I’ve had table service, but waiting staff are treated as professionals and paid properly, guaranteed by deals with unions; menu prices are correspondingly high. The tip was a genuine token of appreciation.

But when I tweeted something to this effect (a tweet that went strangely viral), the responses I got made me think. Many people pointed out that the restaurant trade in Sweden is under enormous pressure, with rising costs, the after-effects of Covid and difficulties recruiting. And as Sweden has become more cosmopolitain, adding ten percent to the bill comes naturally to many.

Boulebar, a restaurant and bar chain with branches around Sweden and Denmark, had a longstanding policy of not accepting tips at all, reasoning that they were outdated and put diners in an uncomfortable position. But in 2021 CEO Henrik Kruse decided to change tack:

“It was a purely financial decision. We were under pressure due to Covid, and we had to keep wages down, so bringing back tips was the solution,” he said, adding that he has a collective agreement and staff also get a union bargained salary, before tips.

Yet for Kruse the new machines, with their pre-set tipping percentages, take things too far:

“We don’t use it, because it makes it even clearer that you’re asking for money. The guest should feel free not to tip. It’s more important for us that the guest feels free to tell people they’re satisfied.”

But for those restaurants that have adopted the new interfaces, the effect has been dramatic. Card processing company Kassacentralen, which was one of the first to launch this feature in Sweden, told Svenska Dagbladet this week that the feature had led to tips for the average establishment doubling, with some places seeing them rise six-fold.

Even unions are relaxed about tipping these days, perhaps understanding that they’re a significant extra income for their members. Union representatives have often in the past spoken out against tipping, arguing that the practice is demeaning to staff and that tips were spread unevenly, with staff in cafés or fast food joints getting nothing at all. But when I called the Swedish Hotel and Restaurant Union (HRF), a spokesman said that the union had no view on the practice, and it was a matter for staff, business owners and customers to decide.

So is tipping now expected in Sweden? The old advice probably still stands; waiters are still not as reliant on tips as staff in many other countries, so a lavish tip is not necessary. But as Swedes start to tip more generously, you might stick out if you leave nothing at all.

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