Chilli-lime barramundi with herbs and fried shallots

Imagine if you got dropped in a hot pan, you’d do this too, you get ouch. Today, I'm going to cook crispy skin barramundi with chilli, lime herbs and crispy shallots. But the secret is in the crispy skin of the barramundi. And I've got a couple of tricks up my sleeve to show you exactly how to get it right. All right, the first thing we're going to do is take a little bit of paper towel and just pad the skin of the barramundi dry. The next thing is pick up your fish, and then with a sharp knife, you just go in maybe a couple of centimetres, just like that. Right now what you've done is you've just opened up that fish, and it's going to allow some of the fat to render out of the skin. And it's going to help to get that skin even crispier. Next you season the fish, right. So if you use an a coarse salt, like the one I've got here, just break it up in your fingers a little bit, you don't want to use a terribly coarse one when you're cooking fish because you don't want anything very much between the fish and the pan, right, you want it to have a nice smooth surface. So you can just open up those little score marks. And just season inside there as well. Then I'm going to flip it over and season on the other side as well. My next little tip is going to shock you, right, because you've always been told, get your pan nice and hot and then put your fish in. But let me show you something. When you put the fish in the pan, this is what happens. You drop it in. And then the fish goes like that. If this was the pan, you left with this big pocket that doesn't get crispy skin on it right. So you want that skin flat against the pan. And the way to do it is through a cold pan and then you just gradually increase the temperature. Alright, you want to see how it's done. I'm going to start on one, right this is an induction cooktop, it goes up to 15. So start on 1, put just a little drizzle of oil to swirl that oil around a little or you can just move your fish around the pan like that too. And you'll see straight away there's virtually no heat in that pan, and you give it a second, and then you turn it up to two. And then you turn it up to three and four. And this first couple of minutes is really just letting that fish relax into the pan, which sounds silly, but it does work. The dressing on this you guys it's so easy. A couple of key ingredients: lime juice, fish sauce, there's garlic, there's some brown sugar, there's some shallot, some ginger. But the truth is you can put whatever you want in there, you be the boss of your ingredients, but have a taste. Just balance it out and make sure it tastes good. Now we can start to escalate that temperature a bit and move it up to a nine. The other thing I do when I cook fish with the skin on is I cook it nearly the whole way through the fish with the skin down. So if I cook it for five minutes, let's say four minutes will be on the skin side and only one minute on the other side. If you come on in and have a look, you'll see it's just starting to bubble, right, the fish has literally been in the past five minutes and we're just starting to get a little bit of action down there now. So that's how slow I want you to do this. Once you get it to that place where you feel like the skin is naturally quite relaxed. And let me pull it out and show it to you, see how it's nice and flat. And it's now already getting a little bit golden. That's exactly what you want. And we're going to pop it back in. Now that the skins kind of sit on the bottom of the pan, go for your life, crank the heat as high as you'd like. Okay, let's turn this over. Now I use two hands, I go underneath with my spatula, and then I just turn it over like that. Look at that, beautiful. Now another thing you can do is just to drop more olive oil into your pan. Wait for that to get nice and hot. We're gonna baste it over the top of the fish. Drop my lime juice, fish sauce and all those aromatics in there. I just kind of rest it straight over the top, let some of that beautiful flavour permeate through the fish. The rule of thumb is if it takes five minutes to cook rest of for two and a half if it takes 30 minutes to cook, rest it for 15 seconds. About half the time it takes to cook is what you should rest it for. Once your fish has had a couple of minutes to rest, you can go ahead and take a few of these beautiful aromatics and just place in the bottom of your plate, you serve in plain chilli, garlic, ginger, shallots. And then of course the lime juice and the fish sauce. They make really beautiful strong flavours. Pick up your fish, straight on there. And then I garnish it with gorgeous fresh herbs.