dorade en croute de sel

Last Sunday we decided (since it was so SUNNY HERE!) to check out the open air market near our place next to Bastille.  It was BUSY but great!  Since we were just talking about our trip to Guadeloupe we decided to get some lunch from a Guadeloupian/Martiniquian Creole stand.  It was great!  Then we bought some fresh veggies, fruits, sausage and some Dorade which is a white fish - which in English it's called Sea Bream (whatever that is!)

When we were in London at a French Bistro F had the best Dorade which was encrusted in salt...it looked like a pastry that covered it.  They do not serve it with the crust.  It was cooked to perfection.  So we decided we can do this!  So we bought the fish and headed home.

After doing some research online we noticed that it took A LOT of sea salt to cook two fish...1 kilogram of salt per fish (which is 2lbs of salt per fish)!!!  So we headed to a small epicere (convenience store) which are the only stores open on a Sunday evening.

We washed, gutted, scaled (which some recipes called for not doing this...next time we will not), took off all the fins.  With the 4lbs of sea salt we added two egg whites and enough water to make the salt a bit moist.  Then we laid a good 3/4 of an inch of salt down on a baking pan, laid the fish on top, and covered the remaining salt over the two fish.  Pics will show what it looked like.  They looked like big snow balls ;-)

Then we put it in the oven for 30 mins.  When the fish was done the salt mixture was as hard as a rock.  We had to hammer it out.  The skin unfortunately came off in the process but no biggie...this is why next time we will not scale the fish!

I thought with that much salt the fish might turn out too salty but it was perfect!  We rarely cook fish at home but this recipe was so simple I'm sure we will be eating fish at home more often ;-)