With just three perfectly cooked elements on one plate, this simple dish is big on flavour
Diana Henry The Telegraph's award-winning cookery writer
Diana Henry is the Telegraph’s much-loved cookery writer. She shares recipes each week, for everything from speedy family dinners to special menus that friends will remember for months. She is also a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4, and her journalism and recipe books, including Simple and How to Eat a Peach, are multi-award-winning. A mother of two sons, Diana can satisfy even the fussiest of eaters.
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Published
I still have the photographs of the first meal I ate at Café Cecilia in East London on my phone. I went there after it opened in 2021. The young Irish chef, Max Rocha, had worked at The River Café and Spring in London and I wanted to see how his Irishness and the influence of these restaurants came together.
Oysters and Guinness bread were on the menu, but it wasn’t the dishes themselves but the lack of fussiness that got me. No matter how often restaurants boast about keeping things simple, few of them do. Here I had hake, silky roast peppers and aioli, three perfectly cooked elements on one plate.
Max’s hake, shared here, re-orientated me, showed me how startling a dish this simple can be. Two of the components can be made in advance which means you only have the hake to cook at the last minute. This makes it a perfect restaurant dish but it’s good for the home kitchen too.
Overview
Prep time
20 mins
Cook time
1 hr
10 mins
Serves
4
Ingredients
- 6 garlic cloves
- juice of ½ lemon
- 1 tsp Dijon mustard
- 3 egg yolks
- 300ml olive oil, plus a good glug for the peppers
- 200ml neutral oil (such as sunflower), plus more for frying
- 4 romero peppers
- 8 basil leaves
- 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 4 hake fillets (skin on)
Method
Step
To make the aioli, finely chop 4 of the garlic cloves and put them into a food processor with the juice of ½ lemon, 1 tsp Dijon mustard and 3 egg yolks.
Step
Blitz the ingredients, then slowly incorporate 300ml olive oil and 200ml neutral oil, adding the oil very slowly as the motor is running. Keep some water at room temperature beside you while adding the oil in case it looks as if the aioli might split. If it does, add a little drop of water to bring the aioli back together.
Step
Cover the aioli and put it in the fridge until you’ve made everything else.
Step
Heat the oven to 200C/190C fan/gas mark 6 and put 4 romero peppers in a roasting tin or baking tray.
Step
Roast the peppers until they’re completely black on one side, then turn them over and cook them on the other side. It should take around 30 minutes on each side.
Step
When the peppers are fully roasted and black, put them in a bowl and cover with cling film. Allow to cool then, using gloves, remove the skins and seeds from the peppers and place the flesh in a bowl.
Step
Thinly slice the remaining 2 garlic cloves and add them along with 8 basil leaves, 1 tbsp red wine vinegar and a nice glug of olive oil plus some salt and pepper.
Step
Gently turn the peppers over in this. Season 4 hake fillets with salt on both sides.
Step
Set a large non-stick frying pan over a medium-high heat.
Step
Heat some neutral oil in this and place the hake fillets in the pan, skin-side down. Don’t touch the hake for 4 minutes, by which time the skin will have become crisp and released itself from the pan.
Step
Turn the hake over carefully with a fish slice on to its other side.
Step
Cook for 3 more minutes. When the hake is ready, place the fillets, skin-side up, on four plates and add the romero peppers and a dollop of the aioli.