03/17/2026
MONKFISH A LA SINGAPOURIENNE
Pan-seared monkfish and Taiwanese wheat noodles served with Singaporean-style "chili crab" sauce and celtuce + herbs (rau ram and scallion)
: "I combine my culinary training in French cuisine with my love for Singaporean flavors. Much like my own transition from "Burger Chef" into this new chapter, the monkfish--once deemed "the poor man's lobster"--has come into its own. This dish represents my own new (or perhaps borrowed) beginning."
The evolution of a dish:
The initial idea was to make an Asian version of Lobster Americaine. I decided to make a Singaporean chili crab sauce, but modified to honor the dish it's inspired by. I chose to omit using a slurry and did not add eggs in at the end. Instead of chicken stock, I made a shellfish stock. I wanted the deep shellfish flavor of the Americaine sauce, which uses lobster tomalley. My stock used crab tomalley and shrimp shells. To round out the sauce and make it less spicy, I added a touch of heavy cream and some butter at the end.
The dish went through more rounds of testing than I expected. We tried shrimp and lobster for the first round, but we thought the shrimp was hard to eat. Using a whole lobster, we couldn't decide how to make the cost work within the budget - do we only buy tails or claws? If we used whole lobster to have the heads for the sauce, do some guests get tails while others get claws? And then I recalled the humble monkfish, AKA "poor man's lobster." We bought some from HEB, tested it, and loved it! Okay, protein secured.
I wanted to use bamboo as the vegetable in my dish, since it is a springtime veggie in Taiwan. Unfortunately, we could not find one that we loved, so we decided to pivot to celtuce, which can provide a similar texture to bamboo. We tested it in different shapes and sizes, hot and cold, cooked and raw. We settled on salted, then rinsed, for a nice crunch without too much vegetal bitterness.
As for the noodles, we didn't have to test much, since it just made sense. I did switch noodles at the last second since I noticed a Taiwanese noodle that worked for the dish, and it just felt fitting.
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