Mexican Style Bouillabaisse

Oh great!.......  Another newsletter from that moron in Cabo

Believe it or not –once upon a time in America, not so very long ago- there was no Food Channel, no Celebrity chefs, no glossy food magazines and no $300 a bottle Balsamic vinegar.   If you wanted some info about food you asked your mom or turned to the ‘Joy of Cooking’ or ‘Fanny Farmer’ cook book.  Pretty much the only other resource for most amateur cooks was the daily newspaper and the ‘Home” page or section.  For me, that was the LA Times which had a food page once a week  (Thursday if memory serves).  Unfortunately the recipes were always all about Tuna Casserole, Meat Loaf or Tamale Pie or 16 New Ways to make Macaroni and cheese.  Oh, molded Jello salads were a big deal especially the green Jello with grated carrots.  If you wanted to go to a “GOOD” restaurant you had to head to a steak house.  No Thai, no Sezchuan, no Tandoori and no Sushi.  There was virtually nothing remotely exotic– if you wanted something exotic it was Italian, Mexican or Chinese.  These restaurants were considered slightly low class and were usually located in semi-seedy areas.  If you could find the bus depot you could find a Chinese restaurant.  These places were almost always interchangeable – a store front with plate glass windows - one big room with lots of Formica dinette sets from Sears or Monkey Ward. You could tell what kind of place it was by the ‘décor’.  Last Year’s dusty x-mas lights and some black velvet paintings and a gaudy calendar showing a scantily clad Aztec maiden being sacrificed indicated Mexican food.  A pagoda against the back wall and a bunch of paper lanterns meant Chinese. Plastic red and white checked table cloths, straw covered wine bottles and plastic grape vines …..Italian for sure.  And then along came Julia.  Things have never been the same.  Julia Child’s cooking show on PBS captured America’s imagination and when her book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ was published in 1961 (it’s still a perennial best-seller) things really changed.   Almost over night restaurants named ‘Chez’ something or ‘La Petit’ something else popped up all over America.  Any place wanting to be considered a ‘good’ place had menus in French.  The food sections of our daily papers skipped directly from the green Jello right to Coq aux Vin and Bouef Bourguignon.  The food page of the Times did an article on Bouillabaisse showing a couple at a table in a sidewalk café in France overlooking the Mediterranean.    They, of course were enjoying some Bouillabaisse.  It sounded wonderful and I wanted some.  For a lot of years if I was in a restaurant that had bouillabaisse I ordered it and it was always the same – AWFUL!!  So fishy it tasted like cat food or it had so much fennel and Pernod that it tasted like cat-food with licorice sauce.  I guess I’m a slow learner because I kept trying for many years.  I figured a dish that famous must have gotten famous for a reason.   Long after I had given up on Bouillabaisse I found myself in a small open air restaurant on the water in Topolobampo, Mexico.  A fat, jolly middle aged woman in a soiled apron was the cook, waiter, bartender and owner.  All she was serving that day was fried fish with garlic and Caldo de mariscos (seafood soup).  I had the soup and It was wonderful - light and fresh and tasting of the sea without being the least bit fishy. It was  chock full of fish, shrimp, scallops, crab and shell fish and garnished with a squeeze of lime it was everything I had hoped to find in the elusive ‘bouillabaisse’,  When I got back to the states  I tried to duplicate it.  I did -- only better and it’s been on my menu for about 30 years.  It is really easy to make and it is way better than the complicated recipes put forth by all the snotty, arrogant celebrity chefs.  Here’s how you make it.

Spencer’s Mexican Style Bouillabaisse


But before you start……..

There are a few more things I want to say.  Before I send out a recipe I usually check some cook-book and the internet - partially to make sure I haven’t make some stupid egregious error, but mostly to see if I can find a famous chef saying something stupid so I can ridicule him/her in my newsletter.  WOW!  I hit a gold mine on this one.  Google has a 109,000 pages of Bouillabaisse listings.  I read over a lot of them and found they have one thing in common. They all suck.   Not an original thought in the lot.  Some moron took a 200 year old recipe from Escoffier then all the other morons copied it.  Their recipe is from before they had refrigerators and when one of your servants could spend 8 or ten hours shopping and preparing dinner.   Their recipe calls for spending a couple of hours making a fish stock before you even start on the damn soup.  They all say you have to use fish caught that morning. One especially arrogant moron claims that you have to have at least 10 kinds of fish (and this is just for the stock) including: scorpion fish, stingfish, the head of a conger eel, John Dory, tilefish, moray eel,  shark, dogfish and  sea robin (gurnard) among others. Shit, I don’t think the Monterrey aquarium has all those fish and I have never seen conger eel heads for sale anywhere.  They also say you should use whole uncleaned , unscaled, small whitefish in the stock along with the skin, bones and heads of whatever fish you use in the soup.  No wonder it tastes like cat-food.  Don’t be scared - my recipe is easy and tastes way better than their’s.  Here’s how to make ‘Spencer’s Mexican style Bouillabaisse’.  You could also call it  ‘Caldo de Mariscos estilo Topolobampo’ or plain old ‘sea-food soup’.  Be patient, we’re almost to the recipe, but first I want to tell you a couple of things about my recipe.

1. The lime/lemon juice is a very important to this dish- do not skip it

2. Don’t even think about making a fish stock.  Fish heads, bones, fins and scales are garbage and should be treated as such.  When things aren’t right we say ‘something is fishy’ so you want this dish to taste of the sea with nothing fishy about it.  In the restaurant when I get a fish that smells fishy I throw it out.  You should do the same.  When I started making this soup, years ago, I used plain water. You can do the same and the results will be wonderful. However, I use so much chicken at Felix’ that we always have lots of chicken stock around.  I tried using chicken stock in my fish soup and the improvement was incredible.

3. All of their recipes call for lots of chopped fresh fennel – which explains the licorice taste.  If you boil chopped fennel the anise taste infuses the stock- and your soup tastes like licorice. I suppose a box of Good and Plenty’s would work too, but what I do is use Fennel seeds.  Fennel goes great with the fish but I don’t want the broth to have a licoricey fennel taste.  I want the little burst of flavor when I bite into a fennel seed.  None of these ingredients or measurements are critical if you can’t find crab then skip it – use what you have available

4. You’ll probably notice that there are no bivalves (clams, mussels etc.) in my recipe .  This is because I’m edgy about the refrigeration and quality available here.  I think they are great in this dish and if you have fresh mussels or clams near you – use them. If you have too much money or are kissing the bosses ass you can add lobster as well – it doesn’t do too much for the soup but it looks impressive.  Okay here’s how you make my bouillabaisse for 6 or 8 people



Parts list

These amounts are approximate and not to worry if you don’t get them exact.
Read the recipe through entirely before you start because I usually forget something and put it in at the end.

3 pounds of firm white filets of fish…………..one pound chopped very fine (almost like hamburger) and the other two cut into big bite-sized chunks.   I use cabrilla (sea bass) because it’s always available, but you can use almost any firm white fish – halibut, ling cod, cod, rock cod, whatever.

3 or 4 Italian sausages………….cut into slices about the thickness of my little finger.  If my finger’s not around - use your own.

3 or 4 cooked crabs…………….I use  small local blue crabs (because that’s what’s available), you can use what’s available where you live.  Just toss the crabs into into a pot of cold water and bring them to a boil for no more than a minute or two.  Let them cool then rip their little legs and claws off and set them aside.  Take the flap off the underside of the body - clean out all the junk that doesn’t look like food and break the body in half.  Set them over with the legs and claws.

Shrimp…………………..peeled and deveined. I use shrimp that run 25-30 per pound.  5 or six shrimp for each serving.  You can use whatever size you can afford but I don’t recommend really little ones.

Scallops……………………also about 5 or 6 per serving. I use a fresh local scallop called ‘callo de almeja’ about as big around as a quarter.  They’re probably called ‘Bay scallops where you are.

A couple or three medium onions……..peeled and chopped.  At Felix’ I chop them pretty fine, but I also like them in larger chunks – whatever floats your boat.
Ripe red tomatoes………chopped into whatever size you like.  You want a pile a little bigger than the pile of chopped onions.  Super market tomatoes are generally so crummy you would be better off using canned whole tomatoes that you run through a blender.

A few cloves of chopped garlic……….or more………..or less.

A whole bunch of chopped parsley…………….don’t be stingy this is not a garnish this is an important part of the recipe.

teaspoon fennel seeds…………….. do not use fresh fennel unless you are prepared to take my name off the recipe

A lot of chopped lettuce………………Very finely chopped.   I’ve never actually measured but it’s probably at least 4 or 5 cups.  Use iceburg, red, romaine, butter, whatever

Fresh lemon or lime wedges………….as a garnish to be squeezed into the bowl  or very thin slices to actually float on the surface of the soup.

Tabasco……………………just a little bit

Worcestershire sauce…………also just a little

A dab or two of butter

Salt…………….to taste, but don’t add it until the very end.  I don’t use any black pepper in this but you can.

A couple of quarts of liquid……..you can use water, but chicken stock (homemade or store bought) really makes it special. If you use store bought, it’s generally very salty - so be careful with any added salt

Cilantro………I don’t use cilantro, but if I did I wouldn’t put it in the soup - I’d serve it on the side and let the diners decide.

Cooked white rice…….enough to put a good scoop in the bottom of each bowl.  The rice is not traditional but that’ the way I do it.  I nice crisp slice of garlic toast would also work well. Your choice.


Okay, let’s cook it up  -1st step

In a large soup pot cook the sausage over medium heat in a little bit of oil.  When the sausage is just lightly browned - toss in the finely chopped fish, the garlic, onions and fennel seeds.  Give it a good stir and keep cooking until the onions are well cooked but not browned.  Toss in a good big handful of the parsley and give it a couple more stirs.  Now add the tomatoes - either fresh or canned-blended. Stir and cook for a few minutes.  Add the liquid (hopefully chicken stock) and bring it to a boil. Turn it down to a simmer – put a lid on it and let it simmer away for a half hour or so.  Then add the chopped lettuce. The lettuce will float on the surface and you want to add enough so it covers the soup at least an inch thick.  Give it a good stir put a lid on the pot and let it simmer some more –stirring occasionally.  If we’ve done it right the lettuce will pretty much disappear, leaving only a vaguely tarragon-ish taste and a slightly thickened stock.  In all the years I’ve been making this soup, no one has ever guessed that lettuce is the secret ingredient.  As soon as the lettuce has been absorbed the soup is done………..almost.  Add a couple of good shakes of Tabasco and a couple of Worcestershire and about a third of a cube of butter stir it in and turn off the gas.  You’re done with this part of the deal.  I taste this soup everyday and, if it’s done right I cannot taste the Tabasco, Worcestershire or butter but if it’s missing, I can tell.

2nd step

The second step is the reason your soup is going to be so much better than all the celebrity chef’s.  They throw all the seafood in at the same time.  A half hour into the process the shrimp and scallops are way overcooked, the fish is falling apart and the clams and mussels are tougher’n a boot.  So I add the shrimp, scallops and other sea stuff last.    I put however many bowls of soup I need into a smaller pot and add the shrimp the fish, crab and scallops,  bring it to a simmer.  As soon as the fish has turned from grayish to white it’s done.   If you’re using clams and/or mussels it’s done when the shells open.  Use a slotted spoon to put the 5 or 6 shrimp, 5or 6 scallops, half a crab body, a crab claw and a generous amount of fish over the rice (or garlic toast) in each bowl. Then with a ladle add broth to cover everything.  At Felix’ we serve it with lime wedges and a nutcracker for the crab.  . At home I actually float a couple of thin lemon/lime slices on each soup.  For some reason Americans are reluctant to use the lime, but it’s an important part of this dish, so you should insist.  Hope I didn’t forget anything.  Let me know how it turns out.

Spencer