When Marseille fishermen cooked soup in the evening from the remains of their unsold catch, they had no idea that in the future this dish would become a delicacy that would be served in the best French restaurants. The first Marseille bouillabaisse was made from pieces of dry bread, small fish, shrimp, squid and shellfish, and now lobster and expensive fish are added to this soup, so the cost of a plate of soup sometimes reaches 200 euros. If you believe the French legend, the goddess of love and beauty Aphrodite was preparing bouillabaisse and feeding it to her husband Hephaestus, because she was born from sea foam and the sea element was almost native to her. However, let's get down from Olympus and go to the kitchen to understand how to prepare bouillabaisse at home.
Marseille bouillabaisse soup: a classic fishermen's recipe
Sasha Cherny has a story “Bouillabaisse”, and in it the son of a fisherman tells how to cook the famous Marseille soup. “In bouillabaisse, the main thing is the red fish,” he explains. - Spiky snout, bulging eyes, red-gray scales, red fins and tail. For the broth, so that the sea smells stronger, add small crabs, mules, white shells, shrimp, small octopuses... Seasoning - bay leaf, saffron, garlic, pepper, onion, salt...” A real bouillabaisse, according to experts, is a lunar sonata; it is no coincidence that in ancient cookbooks there are recommendations to use at least 40 varieties of fish to prepare the soup.
By the way, the heroine of the story’s soup turned out to be tasteless because she cooked it incorrectly. Therefore, let’s talk about how to prepare bouillabaisse so that it still looks like a lunar sonata and you don’t want, as Sasha Cherny writes, “no Chinese nuts, no icicle candies, no pistachio ice cream - just one bouillabaisse”!
Boisbes in Parisian style from master of French cuisine Auguste Escoffier
Gourmets and connoisseurs of buaibes consider this version of the famous soup to be one of the best. A recipe for 10 people is given from O. Escoffier’s bestseller “The Culinary Guide”.
Ingredients:
- Sea fish in equal proportions sea rooster, red mullet, flounder, whiting, conger eel - 2.5 kilograms
- Mussels, lobsters - as an auxiliary element
- Leek, white part – 50 grams
- Onion – 150 grams
- Olive oil – 300 milliliters
- Wine – 60 milliliters
- Pressed tomatoes, peeled and seeded – 300 grams
- Pressed garlic – 30 grams
- Butter – 40 grams
- Flour – 15 grams
- Pepper – 3 grams
Preparation:
Sauté coarsely chopped onions and leeks in olive oil in half the vegetable oil. Add 1 liter of water and wine. Season: 16 grams of salt, a pinch of saffron, a pinch of a mixture of Provencal herbs, add crushed tomatoes and garlic, pepper and cook after boiling over medium heat for 20 minutes. You can add fins, tails and fish heads, cleared of eyes and gills, to the broth.
Place pieces of fish, lobsters, and peeled mussels in a saucepan in layers. Pour in the broth, pour in the other half of the oil and cook over high heat for 15 minutes.
Before finishing cooking, thicken the buaibes with butter and flour.
Serve with Joko bread, previously soaked in broth and grilled. Just before serving, rub the bread with garlic. It is not cut, but broken by hand.
Step-by-step bouillabaisse recipe with photos
So, if you follow the recommendations of experienced chefs, to prepare a classic bouillabaisse you will need 2 kg of any small sea fish and some vegetables - a fennel bulb, 3 tomatoes, 3 cloves of garlic, 2 leeks and 2 onions, as well as 3 stalks of celery. For spices, take a bouquet garni, which includes parsley, bay leaf, thyme, basil, rosemary, tarragon, sea salt and olive oil are also useful.
Cooking method:
1. Finely chop the celery, all the leeks, 1 clove of garlic and 1 onion.
2. Fry, stirring constantly, vegetables in 7 tbsp. l. olive oil.
3. Rinse the fish, clean it from the entrails, remove the tails, heads and fins, place it in the frying pan with the frying vegetables.
4. Add water so that it is above the level of the fish scraps, and then simmer for 20 minutes.
5. Pour boiling water over the tomatoes, peel them and grind the pulp into a puree.
6. Finely chop the fennel, 1 more onion, 2 cloves of garlic, fry the vegetables in a frying pan in a small amount of oil.
7. Add chopped tomato pulp to the vegetables.
8. Strain the cooled fish broth, remove the heads, and rub the vegetable grounds through a sieve.
9. Pour the broth into the fried vegetables, mix with the pureed vegetables from the broth, add salt and seasonings.
10. Place pieces of cut fish into the broth and cook until soft.
11. Serve the broth separately - with a toasted baguette and Provencal rouille garlic sauce, which you can prepare yourself. The fish is placed on a plate, and everyone adds it to the broth themselves.
Buaybes with oranges and tomatoes
The recipe provides a layout for two servings.
Ingredients:
- Sea bass – 0.6 kilograms
- Onion – 60 grams
- Cloves – 6 grams
- Celery root – 50 grams
- Celery stalk – 80 grams
- Carrots – 50 grams
- Busho mussels – 200 grams
- Squid – 100 grams
- Tiger prawns – 100 grams
- Tuna – 80 grams
- Octopus – 100 grams
- Olive oil – 100 grams
- Fennel – 100 grams
- Tomatoes in their own juice – 200 grams
- White wine – 30 milliliters
- Garlic - to taste
- Orange – 100 grams
- Pepperoni, sugar, salt - to taste.
- Sun-dried tomatoes – 30 grams.
Preparation:
Place the fish in a saucepan, add water so that it covers the fish to the thickness of a finger and cook the broth for an hour. Add the octopus and cook for another forty minutes.
Chop the vegetables coarsely.
Fry the onion with a couple of cloves until soft. Add the remaining coarsely chopped vegetables and simmer until soft. Add wine and simmer until the smell of alcohol disappears. Then add chopped garlic.
Pour the broth into the prepared vegetables and add the octopuses.
Peel and chop squid, mussels, shrimp. Chop the tuna meat. Place the octopuses into the soup when ready.
Squid, mussels, shrimp, like tuna meat cannot be overcooked - they become tough.
In a frying pan, fry sun-dried tomatoes, sliced oranges, fennel and celery, and garlic. Puree the tomatoes and place in a frying pan. Simmer and pour in broth. Boil and add prepared fish and seafood. Cook for a couple of minutes.
Rouille sauce for classic bouillabaisse
Grind 5 large cloves of garlic in a mortar, ½ tsp. ground saffron, ½ tsp. salt and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Add 4 raw yolks to the spicy garlic paste and very slowly, literally 1 coffee spoon every 15 seconds, add ½ liter of olive oil. As soon as the sauce thickens and acquires the consistency of mayonnaise, it is ready, but make sure that the mass does not separate, otherwise it will be impossible to restore the aesthetic appearance of the sauce. Instead of cayenne pepper, you can use chili pepper, and a little paprika or finely chopped red bell pepper, baked in the oven, will make the taste of the sauce softer and more elegant. Sometimes cooks add a little lemon juice to thicken the mixture better. The salt is usually coarse sea salt, and the eggs are farm eggs, but you will still need raw yolks for the sauce.
Rouille sauce is suitable not only for bouillabaisse soup, but also for any fish dishes. It has a striking orange color, which is why the French call it “rust”.
Buaybes by Jimmy Oliver
This bouaibes recipe comes from one of the most popular television cooking show hosts, Jimmy Oliver. The highlight of this soup is that the author suggests using cheap varieties of sea fish and combining them with freshwater species. The soup has a strong garlic flavor.
Ingredients:
- Tomatoes in their own juice – 2 cans of 400 grams
- Fish broth – 1 liter
- Saffron - a pinch
- Corn - a pinch
- Hake, bream – 2 kilograms
- Fennel – 1 piece
- Onion – 3 heads
- Celery root – 1 piece
- Fennel seeds – 1 teaspoon
- Bay leaf – 2 pieces
- Salt, pepper - to taste
- Garlic – 1 head
- Carrots – 2 pieces
- Parsley – 1 handful
- Ciabatta – 1 loaf
- Butter – 1 small piece.
Preparation:
Chop the vegetables coarsely, fry with parsley and crushed fennel seeds, bay leaves in olive oil in a thick-bottomed saucepan over low heat. Cover the pan with a parchment cartouche and cook until the vegetables soften.
When the vegetables soften, remove the cartouche, turn up the heat and cook until the vegetables are caramelized. Then add broth, tomatoes, saffron, and turmeric and after the soup boils, reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour.
Pour the finished soup into a blender and grind. Then pour into a saucepan and heat until bubbles appear - add fish, cut into portions and cook over low heat for 15 minutes.
Serve with toasted ciabatta rings and aioli sauce.
Aioli sauce is a Provençal sauce. In a bowl, grind the garlic, yolk and salt, adding Provençal oil. When the sauce reaches the consistency of mayonnaise. Amount of ingredients - to taste.
How to make bouillabaisse soup at home: secrets and subtleties
There are so many options for making soup that it is difficult to choose the right recipe. Each cook puts different fish in the dish and uses his own set of spices, which determine the taste of the dish, but there are general rules that must be followed if you want to prepare a truly tasty and appetizing bouillabaisse.
This soup is made only from sea fish - river fish are not suitable for it. When cooking broth, take 1 liter of water per 1 kg of fish, no more, since bouillabaisse should be thick, rich and rich. For the broth base you will need at least 5 varieties of fish - for example, pollock, tuna, sardine, sea bream, perch, stingray and sunfish. Many of them fall apart during the cooking process and literally dissolve in the broth, giving the necessary thick consistency. Elite varieties of fish are placed directly into a soup plate, separating the pulp from the bones - this can be bream, conger eel, haddock, salmon, mullet and scorpionfish.
First, fish trimmings are always stewed and only then fish are added to the soup - first the denser varieties, and then the soft ones. Many recipes also use seafood - squid, scallops, mussels, shrimp, octopus tentacles and crabs. Sometimes carrots and potatoes are added to bouillabaisse - the potatoes boil and make the soup even thicker.
Spices in the soup are required - saffron, basil, thyme, celery, paprika, and for piquancy, some French cooks add orange zest and a little white wine. They give bouillabaisse a fresher taste.
Japanese buaibes
Although Japanese chefs are famous for their conservatism, they could not ignore the success of buaibes and offered their own recipe, taking into account national traditions.
Ingredients:
- Daikon – 35 grams
- Zucchini – 35 grams
- Chinese salad – 75 grams
- Onions – 75 grams
- Shitake mushrooms – 10 grams
- Shimiji mushrooms -7 grams
- Cilantro – 3 grams
- Miso broth – 400 milliliters
- Shichimi spices – 1 gram
- Tsuyu sauce – 50 milliliters
- Salmon – 50 grams
- Green onions – 3 grams
Preparation:
Cook a strong miso broth from dashi, tuna, kombu. Add red miso paste (4 tablespoons per 1 liter). Pour into a serving plate and add chopped vegetables and mushrooms. Season with spices and tsuyu sauce. Place a piece of salmon. Garnish with cilantro.
Quick bouillabaisse with seafood
If you don't have time to spend in the kitchen, try a simplified version of bouillabaisse. Cook fish broth from 600 g of salmon cut into pieces, add 1 medium carrot and 300 g of celery, continuing to cook.
At this time, prepare the fry for the soup - sauté 1 finely chopped onion in vegetable oil until golden brown, add paprika and after a minute turn off the heat.
Mix the dressing with the broth, cook for another 20 minutes, then add 200 g of shrimp to the soup after 5 minutes and after another 5 minutes - 200 g of squid. After 10 minutes, turn off the soup and let it brew. It is not known what the fisherman from Sasha Cherny’s story would say, but you will like the rich fish soup, especially if you serve potatoes and a garlic-rubbed baguette separately.
Buaybes at the cinema
The creators of the TV series “Kitchen” once let it slip that it was according to this recipe that buaibes was prepared, which they liked so much that they introduced this soup into the script of the film and made it a hit for chef Viktor Barinov. For six servings you will need the following ingredients.
Ingredients:
- Egg yolks – 1 piece
- Saffron – 1 pinch
- Cayenne pepper – 1 pinch
- Wig 2 pinches
- Garlic – 3 cloves
- Olive oil – 100 milliliters
- Onion – 1 head
- Celery – 3 stalks
- Ramson – ½ bunch
- Carrots – 1 piece
- Parsley – ½ bunch
- Fish bones – 0.5 kilograms
- Peppercorns – 6 pieces
- Seabass – 0.6 kilograms
- Salmon – 0.5 kilograms
- Shrimp – 0.3 kilograms
- Shallots – 2 pieces
- Tomatoes in their own juice - ½ can
- Medium sized squid – 1 piece
- Baguette – ½ loaf.
Preparation:
Clean and fillet the fish. Clean the shrimp and squid.
Place bones, fish heads without eyes and gills, tails, fins, shells and heads of shrimp in a saucepan, pour 2 liters of boiling water and start cooking the broth.
When the water boils, add a peeled, uncut onion, chopped 2 stalks of celery, 1 carrot, wild garlic and parsley, peppercorns and cook for 40 minutes over medium heat.
Prepare vegetables. Cut the remaining celery, shallots and garlic into cubes. Heat the olive oil in a thick-bottomed saucepan, add the prepared vegetables and heat until the onion is translucent. Add tomatoes in their own juice and, stirring, cook for 2 minutes. Then strain the finished broth directly into the pan. Continue cooking over low heat for 15 minutes.
Cut the fish fillet into pieces, squid into half rings. Gradually add to the broth with vegetables. First salmon, then after 2 minutes - white fish, after 3 minutes - add shrimp, squid, cook for a couple of minutes and turn off the heat. Let the soup brew for 10-15 minutes in a warm place.
Preparing the sauce for the bread:
In a bowl, mix the yolk, cayenne pepper, paprika, saffron, and salt to taste. While whisking with a pastry whisk, add olive oil until it reaches the consistency of mayonnaise.
The baguette is cut into thin rings, sprinkled with olive oil and dried in an oven preheated to 200˚C.
Basil is used as decoration.
Toulon bouillabaisse for a fun company
This soup resembles Russian soup and seems more familiar and understandable to us. So, wash and cut 3 kg of large sea fish, leaving the heads and tails for the broth. Thinly slice 5 carrots, 2 fennel roots, 5 shallots and 3 sweet white onions, and quarter 10 raw mushrooms. Fry the vegetables and mushrooms over high heat in a large, wide, thick-bottomed pan, then add 2 potatoes and 8 tomatoes, cutting the vegetables into cubes first. Next, add 100 g of rice, 3 chopped celery stalks, 3 chopped thyme sprigs, a pinch of hot pepper, and then fry it all for 7-8 minutes.
Wash 4 kg of small fish of several types, throw them into the pan with the vegetables along with the heads and tails and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring constantly. Pour a bottle of dry white wine into the contents and add a little pastis or a couple of spoons of aniseed vodka, after 15 minutes add 100 g of tomato paste, simmer a little more and pour 6 liters of cold water over the vegetables and fish. Add thinly sliced lemon, a bunch of basil and ½ tsp to the soup. saffron, then cook the bouillabaisse for another half hour, and then add salt and pepper to taste.
Cut large fish fillets into pieces, place them in a deep baking tray, top with lemon slices (2 pieces are enough), salt, and garnish with saffron and basil. Strain the broth through a sieve, strain the vegetables and rice, and then cook 5 sliced potatoes in the strained broth until half cooked. Place the potatoes on the fish in a baking sheet, pour boiling broth over them and bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes at 180 °C - the fish should “cook” after a while, and the soup can be poured into plates. Yes, this recipe is complicated, but the bouillabaisse is worth it!
Ingredients:
- Rice – 100 grams
- Fish (cod, pink salmon, tilapia) – 800 grams
- Seafood (mussels, squid, shrimp) - 200 grams
- Onion – 1 piece
- Garlic - 9 cloves ((in sauce - 4, in soup - 5))
- Tomato – 1 piece
- Petiole celery - 3 pieces
- Orange zest - 1 tbsp. spoon
- Bay leaf – 1 piece
- Spices - To taste (black peppercorns, basil, nutmeg, ground ginger, cloves)
- Egg yolk (in sauce) - 3 pieces
- Olive oil (for sauce) - 2 tbsp. spoons
- Cayenne pepper (in sauce) - 1/2 teaspoon
- Baguette – 1 piece
- Potatoes – 2 pieces
- White semi-sweet wine – 1 glass
Number of servings: 6-8
How to serve bouillabaisse
It is interesting that real Marseille bouillabaisse is served not with dried bread, but with stale bread - in Marseille it is called marette, and this bread is baked especially for bouillabaisse. Sometimes, in addition to fish, boiled potatoes are also served separately if they are not in the soup. In some French restaurants, they separately serve a sea scorpion - a predatory fish, the same one that Sasha Cherny describes in his story, which has “a spiky muzzle, bulging eyes, red-gray scales, red fins and a tail.” It’s very tasty to dip a dry baguette in the broth or coat it with bright yellow sauce, watching how the chef with skillful movements frees the meat from the bones of the “sea dragon”. Bouillabaisse is served with pastis, a traditional aperitif - a very diluted anise liqueur, which the French are very fond of.
After tasting bouillabaisse, you understand why the French are such gourmets. They simply love life very much, and nothing is too small for them, especially when it comes to cooking!
Buaybes in the style of "Fusion"
This is an original dish offered by modern French cuisine.
Ingredients:
- Lemon – 1/2
- Guinea rooster – 1 fish
- Sea scorpion – 1 fish
- Seabass – 1 fish
- Dorado – 1 fish
- Boramundi – 1 fish
- Large shrimps – 8 pieces
- Parsley, cilantro, basil for decoration
- Balsamic vinegar
Preparation:
Separate the cephalothorax from the shrimp and remove the shells. Clean the fish, removing the eyes and gills. Let it cook (up to 40 minutes). Bake the shrimp in the oven.
In a separate bowl, mix sliced and then finely chopped hard cheese, sour cream, and saffron.
Cut the baguette into thin slices and dry in the oven.
Place two large tomatoes, half a celery root, half an onion on a baking sheet, pour in olive oil and bake.
Place greens on a large plate. Then, starting from the edge of the dish, shrimp are successively laid on the greens, then boiled fish.
Place baked vegetables around the edges.
Drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar.
Sauce, broth, and bread are served in separate bowls.
A modern interpretation of French soup
Initially, bouillabaisse was a stew of Marseille fishermen, who prepared it from the catch that was not sold and remained in surplus. Later, with the development of the tourism business, the recipe for Provençal fish soup was changed. They began to add seafood and expensive varieties of fish to it, which is why the cost of a serving of bouillabaisse can reach 200 euros.
In ancient cookery books there are recipes for making Marseilles soup with the addition of 40 varieties of fish. Modern kitchen recommends using up to a dozen items. Sea rooster, sunfish, and sea scorpion are the most popular types of fish used for bouillabaisse. The only taboo is river fish; it is in no way suitable for French fish soup.
