Books, Food, Wine, Travel: Foil-Baked Sea Bream

I love sea bream. Flavour and texture wise it's quite similar to sea bass, but I find it's much easier to eat around the bones due to the difference in shape. Sea bream is known as having a sweet, firm texture. It's not fishy in the way that other white fish, such as haddock or cod are.

The finished product

Baking fish in foil helps keep all of the flavour in, which means you can use just a few ingredients to achieve a really flavourful dish. The foil method often, such as in this recipe, creates a sauce in the bottom of the foil packet during cooking, which means less additional work. It's also incredibly versatile, and you can really put whatever you want in the packet. If you want your fish spicy, add some chili. I used thyme and rosemary, which are fairly hardy herbs cooking-wise, but if you prefer different ones go ahead and swap them out. Want to use butter instead of olive oil? Go for it!

Recipe
Sea bream, whole, gutted and scaled
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
1 Lemon
Few sprigs rosemary
Few sprigs thyme
Garlic, chopped
Aluminum Foil
Baking paper

Step 1
Gut and de-scale your fish. Your fish monger or any fish counter should be able to do this for you. I've removed the head as Mr BFWT can be a bit squeamish about his fish, but if you're happy keeping the head on it'll help add more flavour.

The ingredients

Step 2
Cut a large piece of foil and a smaller piece of baking paper. Place the smaller piece of baking paper in the middle of the larger piece of foil. Drizzle a little olive oil over the baking paper and place the fish on top of the baking paper.

Step 3
Rub a little olive oil on the inside of the fish. Salt and pepper the inside, then squeeze lemon over the inside. Stuff with the garlic and herbs.

Step 4
Drizzle a little more olive oil over the top of the fish. Salt and pepper, and then squeeze the remaining lemon over the fish.