Our August Plant to Plate recipe uses home-grown potatoes as the base for a baked cod traybake. This is thanks to the expertise of our treasured gardening and baking experts, BBC Gardener’s World’s Mark Lane and Great British Bake Off contestant Val Stones.
Val’s thoughts and tips:
I learned to make a similar dish to this from my sister in New Jersey; we would go to the fish counter where many of the fish were from the Pacific or Gulf of Mexico. We would choose a meaty looking one as we found that this recipe worked well with most sweet, meaty fish such as cod loin and haddock. When I came home, I recreated the dish with cod loin and added some of our own favourite seasonal vegetables.
Serving suggestions and timings:
- Serves: 4
- Preparation time: 16 minutes
- Cooking time: 50-60 minutes
Ingredients:
- 900g new potatoes, sliced thinly
- 8 tomatoes, skinned and halved
- 2 red peppers and 1 orange pepper, de-seeded and sliced
- 50g anchovy fillets
- 6 cloves of garlic, diced
- 1 tsp fresh oregano, roughly chopped
- 1 small bulb of fennel, thinly sliced
- 80ml olive oil
- 180ml chicken stock
- 1 lemon, sliced (save the ends for juice)
- 4 pieces of cod loin, approx. 800g
- Salt and pepper to taste
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 180°C, fan 200°C, gas mark 4. Place the potatoes in a pan and par boil for 5 minutes, drain and arrange in the base of the roasting pan.
- Place the sliced tomatoes and peppers on top of the potatoes, and scatter the anchovies, garlic, oregano and fennel over the potatoes before drizzling half the oil over the vegetables and season well.
- Drizzle the chicken stock over the vegetables. Cover the dish with foil and place in the oven to bake for 40 minutes.
- Remove the foil and place the fish pieces on top of the vegetables, drizzle the fish with the remaining olive oil, season well with salt and pepper. Scatter the lemon slices on the vegetables and squeeze the juice from the ends of the lemons onto the cod pieces. Place back in the oven without the foil and bake for a further 20 minutes until the fish is baked through it may a few more minutes.
- Serve from the oven with seasonal vegetables.
Build your own home-grown produce recipe book with the help of our experts Mark Lane and Val Stones and our ‘Plant to Plate Calendar’. Catch up on the year’s recipes so far with pea and mint soup, beetroot brownies and Asian chicken noodle salad.
