Elevated Mackerel

This is a mackerel dish where we're using an agobuito, which is a traditional French soup. We're using it in this instance like a sauce. After breaking down the mackerel, I brine it in a 10% salt solution before letting it air dry overnight. This helps make a crispy skin. To make the agobuito, we blanch garlic. This helps mellow the intensity of the garlic and make for an overall sweeter sauce. We return it to the pot with fresh water, add thyme, cloves, and bay leaves. We blend this with egg yolk, a little bit of xanthan gum, and olive oil. The egg yolk and olive oil make for a very rich texture. Then to cook the fish, I blow torch it before throwing it in the oven. And then as it comes out of the oven, I torch it once again to get the skin to be even more crisp. We poach sunchokes in salted water, and then we saute the sunchoke pieces in butter until brown, as well as fry thin sunchoke chips. The velvety soup contrasts with all the different textural components from the mackerel and sunchoke chips. And the pimenton oil adds a nice smokiness that cuts through all the richness.