Grilled freshwater eel with confited garlic

Grilled freshwater eel with confited garlic
Villa Fiordaliso
Chef: Riccardo Camanini
Country: Italia
City: 25083 Gardone Riviera
Address: Corso Zanardelli, 132
(+39) 036520158

What could be better than looking over Lake Garda while enjoying a fresh fish recently caught in its own waters. The eel, of intrinsically high quality and deliciously grilled, is the best we’ve eaten in years. The author is Riccardo Camanini, a schooled chef that practices a well-tempered cuisine in which expertise and technique prevail. Though he dabbles in rather elaborate formulas, he demonstrates great versatility with dishes such as this one, a testimony to sublime simplicity, divine. The eel, roasted slowly over the embers, takes on a form not unlike a giant paupiette, demonstrating a gelatinous interior texture and a golden exterior, its meat oozing with olive wood fragrances. It embodies the sublimation of the ingredient and the fire: nature and aroma. Such a magnanimous dish needs just a bit of garlic confited in duck fat to culminate its delicacy.



The Recipe



Ingredients

  • 2 eels of 700g
  • 1l duck fat
  • 4 garlic cloves
  • 50g dried black olives, chopped finely
  • 50g oilseed
  • Wild fennel flowers
  • Guérande Salt and pepper

Method

Remove and discard the eel skin. Open and clean the eels and cut into 140g filets. Roll them up and fix them with an olive twig.
Choose 4 small heads of garlic. Remove the base of the garlic heads and blanche 7 times. Next, place the garlic in a pan with a little raw sugar, a dash of salt and the duck fat, cover and cook in the oven at 60° for approximately 3 hours. Blend the olives and the oilseed together. Grill the eel for 25/30 minutes over a low flame; grill the whole garlic heads as well. Finally, trace a fine line of the black olive oil on to the plate, then place the eel ‘skewer’, the garlic cloves removed from the heads, Guérande salt flakes and the wild fennel flowers.