Oven Roasted Trout with Thyme

One of the best things about Sydney is the abundance of fresh seafood, all so readily available. The trick is to do your fish shopping on a Saturday at the fish markets (they close at 5pm, so it’s hard to shop after work). I often ask my fishmonger to scale and gutt the fish I select.
Once you get home, wash all your fish thoroughly under cold tap water, making sure all blood is rinsed out, and pat dry with paper towels. Wrap them in new clean plastic bags (the bags from the fish markets are often dirty) and they are ready for freezing.

When you’re ready to cook your fish, move it from the freezer to the fridge the night before to defrost.

This is a very simple recipe based on Jamie Oliver’s – it’s healthy and takes under 30 minutes. Just a different alternative to fish en papilotte to mix things up a little. Lemon and thyme shouldn’t be restricted to roast chicken, in fact it works quite well with an oily fish like rainbow trout.

INGREDIENTS:

1 whole rainbow trout, scaled and gutted
few sprigs of thyme
sea salt & black pepper
3 tbsps lemon infused olive oil
1 lemon
4 bay leaves
1 clove garlic, crushed

METHOD:
Preheat oven to 200 degrees celcius. Give the trout a good rinse and pat dry with paper towels. Using a mortar and pestle, grind the thyme leaves with 1 tsp sea salt, crushed garlic, black pepper and the olive oil until it becomes a fragrant paste. Rub this mixture all over the trout, covering the skin and inside the belly. Cut lemons in half and remove the ends so they have a flat edge. With the point of a knife, make an incision into the flesh of each lemon half and stick a bay leaf into it. Place trout and lemons on a roasting tray and bake, approximately 10 minutes. The trout is cooked properly when the meat is easily pulled away from the bone at the thickest part of the fish. The skin should be crispy and the roasted lemons should take on a marmalade characteristic.

Serve the trout with the lemon, which you can squeeze on to the fish. The flesh should flake away easily but remain pink and moist. I served my fish with some roasted potatoes and a fresh watercress salad, but it’s really up to personal tastes. You can fillet it restaurant style at the table, or go rustic and combine the flesh with the salad.