It started with me wanting to cook something different other than chicken.

So I was like, “oh what about fish?”

Usually we don’t cook fish because my boyfriend doesn’t like too much the taste of it, like it’s too seafoody and I also don’t like how it stinks the whole place when you cook it.

As I was doing research on what fish dish I could make, I came across this video on youtube, and it looked sooooo good so I wanted to give it a try.

So this dish, as I’ve heard, is one of the most recreated dishes, and it’s called Nobu’s Miso Black Cod. Nobu is a brand referring to global group of luxury hotels and restaurant chains named after its founder, Nobu Matsuhisa, whom is a globally-renowned chef.

I grabbed this pack of two pieces of pacific cod fish that cost me $10. I had no other choice or time to look around and think because the store was closing in about 20 minutes and I still had other things to grab. So I went with that. I doubt it was what I was supposed to get but that should do, that’s what I thought.

Marinaded for two full days, I thought, “this is gonna be good.”

Cooked it in the oven using airfryer setting at 425 F for 8 minutes. But because we wanted to have the fish with king oyster mushrooms, we were also cooking the mushrooms at the same time. The mushrooms were still cooking so I decided to cook the fish for another 2 minutes.

To be honest I was a little bit unhappy with what I made, not gonna blame the recipe. The fish was overcooked so instead of having that soft and juicy texture that I was expecting, it turned out a little dense and dry. Far from “buttery” texture that had been advertised in the videos I thought it could be from the type of fish that I grabbed. And that was definitely the reason. Black cod and Pacific cod are two very different fish.

It might have been better too even if the fish wasn’t the same. Could also be that I cooked it too long for the size of the cuts and also the fact that we don’t have the best fridge. When things are a little cramped in there, we need to adjust the temperature so it’s not too warm that would make food go bad. But when we do that, things just start to freeze. So it could be that the fish was frozen in there for a bit and was too cold before we started cooking them. I also wanted to cook the fish longer to make sure it wasn’t still cold on the inside.

The ingredients for the marinade included sake, white miso paste, mirin and white sugar. As a bit of a review, the marinade / the sauce was way too sweet for me and I didn’t like the way that the bites would leave the pasty texture from miso paste. I love miso but it could be that i’ve had fish dishes that the fish meat was lighter and not with sauce this thick. I also had the fish and mushroom with a little bowl of brown rice and the taste and texture of the rice could have been a bit too overpowering for me. Next time I could try something a little smoother like mashed potatoes or steamed vegetables or different type of rice, like short grain white rice. But the thing is i’m trying to have less of the refined grains because my stomach does not digest it so well.

For future, I would first cook the mirin and sake together to cook out the alcohol then I would add sugar. Once it dissolves, I would take it off heat completely and dissolve miso paste in it rather than boiling it because heat kills whatever that is alive in the miso paste that makes it beneficial for your gut, otherwise there’s no point adding it but just for the flavor.

Regardless, my boyfriend really liked it.

And I thought, “wait until we actually cook black cod, that’d be amazing!”.

Time to go look for some black cod!