Home › The World's Kitchen › Halibut Steaks, Colbert Sauce
Halibut Steaks, Colbert Sauce
Have a teaspoon olive oil, a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper on a plate; mix well, then roll three halibut steaks of three-quarters of a pound each in the seasoning. Arrange on a broiler and broil for six minutes on each side. Remove, place on a hot dish, pour a hot Colbert sauce over the fish and serve.
A plain broiled fish that stands or falls on the sauce and on not overcooking it. Two of the original's numbers need adjusting for a modern kitchen: the broiling time and the amount of oil.
- The hinge: stop earlyHalibut is lean and turns dry and cottony the moment it passes done. Twelve minutes total suits a steak a good inch and a half thick; a common 1-inch steak wants about 4 minutes a side, and it is finished when the flesh flakes at the bone and reads 130-135F at the centre.
- Colbert sauceNot a sauce made separately from scratch here but beurre Colbert in the classic sense: softened butter worked with meat glaze (reduced brown stock), lemon juice, chopped tarragon, salt and pepper, melted just to pouring consistency. It must not be allowed to boil or the butter breaks and the glaze goes greasy.
- Oil quantityA single teaspoon of olive oil will not coat 2 1/4 lb of fish. Use a tablespoon or more, enough to film both faces, or the steaks will stick to the broiler and tear.
- Salt in proportionA teaspoon of salt across three large steaks is about right if it is fine table salt; coarse kosher salt is less dense by volume, so you will need more -- anywhere from half again to double, depending on the brand.
- White pepperCalled for so no black specks show against the pale fish and sauce. It is a genuine flavour difference, not only cosmetic, and worth having ground fresh.
- "Arrange on a broiler"This meant a hinged wire broiler held over coals or set in a range's broiling compartment, so the fish cooked from both sides in turn. Under a modern overhead element, set the rack 4-5 inches from the heat on an oiled rack or pan and turn once.
- Steak size and yieldThree steaks at 12 oz each is a generous four servings, or six modest ones. Halibut steaks that size are usually cross-cut with a section of backbone in the middle; cut along it after cooking to serve two portions from one steak.
- SkinLeave the rim of skin on while broiling to hold the steak together, and lift it off at the table if you prefer. Cut through it in a place or two so it does not curl and lift the flesh off the pan.
Colbert sauce, and the compound butter behind it, belongs to the roll of nineteenth-century French preparations named for court and government figures; it is generally traced to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to Louis XIV, though the attribution is culinary tradition rather than documented invention. Its distinguishing marks are meat glaze and tarragon in butter, which is why a brown, beefy sauce turns up over a white fish here without apology: the escoffier-era kitchen treated glace de viande as a seasoning, not a category boundary. Halibut suited that treatment because it is firm enough to broil in thick steaks and mild enough to carry a strong butter, and because the New England and Pacific fisheries of the period were shipping it on ice to hotel kitchens across the country in the large sizes a 12-ounce steak requires.