Black Cod with Lemon Sous Vide

Still testing Kameko-san, the sous vide machine, this time with a lovely cut of black cod from a larger piece obtained from Foods in Season. To cook it, I took six very thin slices of lemon and arranged them over the top and bottom (skin side) of the fish, then vacuum packed it. Kameko-san's instructions say that a 1" cut of fatty fish should go about 30-50 minutes at 60C (140F); this cut was almost an inch and a half, so I used the upper boundary.

Picture above shows it still in the vacuum bag before consigning it to Kameko-san's care. The first post picture (of one half of the piece, plated) shows how the vacuum process set the lemon slices into the fish (and also impressed the texture of the bag onto the flesh).

It turned out that while the fish was superb, I was a bit excessive in both seasoning and time. I think the fish would have been better cooked only 35 or 40 minutes; while it was succulent, the cod didn't have that textural soft-silk feeling I really like in a just-barely-done fish. The lemon, too, turned out to be a bit much. The slices placed on the flesh side had sharply infused the fish, so that there was a distinct lemon gradient from the flesh side down to the skin. I think in the future I'd put the lemon slices on the skin side and then, when plating, peel them off and transfer them to the flesh side.

That said, with this kind of learning experience, I'm happy to be in class forever.