Black Cod, Fried Rice and a Little Help From Uncle Roger

The plated dinner, miso marinated cod on fried rice with sautéed shiitake mushrooms.

Last night’s dinner used fish from Sekiu, Washington. Again.

I pulled a piece of black cod (sablefish) from the freezer, along with the last piece of Alaskan Leader Seafoods Miso Marinated Black Cod. It’s one of those frozen fish items the SLO Costco doesn’t carry, but I’ve found it at Costco in Rancho Bernardo when visiting my mom and in Burlington, Washington, when visiting Anna’s mom. This last piece came home with us from that December trip.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve cooked with this fish. I wrote about it back in June in I Asked AI What to Serve with Miso Marinated Black Cod — Here’s What We Made.

I find black cod incredibly easy to cook. My preferred method is to broil it after marinating. Done properly, you get a dark, crisp, sweet exterior from the miso marinade and a smooth, buttery, flaky white interior with almost no fishy taste.

In other words, it’s pretty hard to mess up.

Uncle Roger Meets Black Cod

Last night, my YouTube cooking habit got the best of me, and I decided to make Uncle Roger’s fried rice.

It’s not a difficult recipe by any means — unless you are Jamie Oliver.

Sorry, no chili jam in my fried rice.

I had leftover shiitake mushrooms from last week’s Three Mushroom Risotto with Chef Jean-Pierre: A Paso Robles Weeknight Dinner, so I sliced them up and sautéed them in butter and soy sauce.

The mushrooms took longer to prep than they did to cook.

That brings me to one of my favorite simple cooking tips: mise en place. For those lacking in French, it essentially means “set up” or having all of your ingredients prepared and ready to go before you start cooking.

It’s a simple habit that goes a long way, especially when you’re cooking something in a hot wok and everything comes together quickly.

Three-Minute Fried Rice

The fried rice itself took about three minutes to cook.

I heated the wok, added some oil and started tossing in the ingredients: shallot, ginger and garlic. A little more oil went in, followed by three beaten eggs.

Once the eggs were partially cooked, I added the day-old rice.

Now, the recipe really does call for cold, day-old rice. I made mine that morning, spread it out on a baking sheet and put it in the refrigerator. The result was excellent.

Once the rice was broken up and warmed through, I added sweet soy sauce and dark soy sauce around the edge of the wok before tossing everything together.

Toss, toss, toss.

To finish, I added scallions and a small amount of sesame oil.

And let’s not forget the most important ingredient in this fried rice:

MSG.

I use MSG in a lot of my cooking because it enhances the savory flavor without requiring me to dump in a bunch of extra salt.

How do I know the fried rice was good?

Anna had two helpings.

That’s about as good a review as I’m going to get.

A Quick Miso Marinade

The piece of black cod I pulled from the freezer wasn’t marinated, so I whipped up a quick miso marinade using sake, miso paste, soy sauce and a little sugar.

The sugar isn’t there just for sweetness. It also helps with caramelization when the fish hits the broiler.

Traditional miso-marinated black cod recipes often call for the fish to sit in the marinade for up to three days. That’s great if you remember to plan three days ahead.

I usually don’t.

Instead, I’ve started cooking the marinade down until it becomes thicker and more concentrated. I brush that onto the fish as it cooks, adding another coating every few minutes.

I’ve had excellent results using this method. The reduced marinade gets beautifully caramelized under the broiler, giving the fish that sweet, salty, slightly charred exterior I’m looking for.

Broiled Black Cod

I set the broiler to 500 degrees and positioned the rack about 6–8 inches from the element.

The black cod cooked for about 12 minutes, and I brushed it with the reduced marinade every 3–4 minutes.

The result was exactly what I wanted.

The exterior had a sweet and salty caramelized finish, while the interior was buttery, flaky and practically melted in your mouth.

That’s the beauty of black cod. It’s a rich, fatty fish, but the texture is incredibly delicate. And when it’s paired with a miso marinade, the combination of sweet, salty and umami flavors is hard to beat.

Dinner in About 20 Minutes

I plated the black cod right on top of the fried rice and added the sautéed shiitake mushrooms alongside it.

That’s it.

Miso-glazed black cod. Uncle Roger-inspired fried rice. Sautéed shiitake mushrooms.

Dinner was on the table in about 20 minutes.

Not bad for a Tuesday night.

And once again, a little piece of fish that made its way from the waters around Sekiu, Washington, to a Costco freezer, then eventually to my kitchen in Paso Robles, California, turned into one hell of a dinner.

I’d call that a pretty successful trip south.