Sam Kaplan for The New York Times; Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero
"Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face."
The chef Kerry Heffernan was quoting Mike Tyson while standing tall in the bow of a small fishing boat off Montauk Point. It is as true in the kitchen as it is on boats and in the boxing ring. The swells were running high and fat and a little confused, as if in a washing machine about to go off its bearings. The sky was low and dark. The combination was difficult. The rocks on the shore came closer as the boat moved on the tide. Capt. Bryan Goulart, Heffernan's guide, fired up his outboard motor to move.
It was a Friday morning, not quite cold, in the midst of Montauk's fall run. Striped bass, bluefish and false albacore were streaming south by the millions, chasing bait and water in a great annual migration that draws fishermen from all over New York and New England each fall, pilgrims to a fishing Mecca.
Goulart had put Heffernan on top of plenty of fish that day, and the day before. He is a sharp-eyed guide with the instincts of a professional card player, a cowboy's stern patience and an infectious laugh. As a team, the two men had brought many false albacore to the boat, a few bluefish, no striped bass. It was the final day of the Montauk Redbone, a catch-and-release fishing tournament that benefits research into a cure for cystic fibrosis, and Heffernan and Goulart had been in the contest's lead until that morning.
But they needed a striped bass. No boat can win the tournament without one. The plan had been to get it early, at least one, then return to false albacore and stack their numbers high. This plan was not working. Blitzes of striped bass would be present at the point in coming days, and along the south-side beaches running west past the Warhol estate, toward town: huge mats of fish, nearly an acre in size. But no striped bass was forthcoming this day.
Black sea bass were plentiful, however. They seemed to attach themselves to Heffernan's line on every third drop. Black sea bass are a delicious eating fish, white-fleshed and firm, whose stocks have rebounded nicely in the past 10 years, thanks to improved regulations on their harvest. But they were not a part of the Redbone tournament structure. They did not count. Heffernan returned them angrily to the sea.
There was nothing to do but talk about dinner. This is how it goes, sometimes, with fishing. You stand at the bow in defeat, your plan in tatters, and plot for future success.
Heffernan, fresh off his run to the finals of "Top Chef Masters" on Bravo, had no doubt about the protein he would make: "These damn black bass."
The following recipe emerged from that discussion. It was refined in Heffernan's kitchen in Sag Harbor, then taken back to Brooklyn for further work. It results in fillets of marvelous, flaky simplicity, with a blistering crust that intensifies the sweetness of the fish. White rice and a tangle of sautéed greens are excellent accompaniments, along with a glass of bracing white wine.
The cooking method is novel and is itself the product of a shattered plan. The original idea was to roast the two fish, then serve the result to four people. But cooking the bass flat in the pan yielded beautiful fillets from only the top sides of the fish. The bottoms were mushy and unbeautiful. To a professional chef, whose core business is making delicious and presentable all of each ingredient he buys, this was anathema. It was a waste.
And so Heffernan took another fish — a two-pound black bass, gutted, cleaned and trimmed of its scales and gills — and neatly spread apart its collarbones to form a kind of A-frame that allowed the fish to stand on its own in a roasting pan, as if swimming. It was a remarkably stable platform, and presented both fillets to the direct heat of the oven.
To the fish he applied a thick sauce of kochujang, a Korean paste of fermented soybeans and chilies that is available in Asian markets and online, which he had thinned slightly with cream and flavored with nearly a handful of minced fresh thyme, along with a prodigious quantity of garlic. He spread about half of it across the skin of the fish.
The bass went into the oven, with some water in the pan to provide moisture as it cooked. It stood tall there and tightened in the heat. He pulled the pan from the oven just before it was done and let it rest for a few minutes, allowing the residual heat of the fish to do the rest of the work.
The result was marvelous: nicely crusted fillets on both sides of the dish. To serve, Heffernan added some oil and vinegar to what remained of the sauce and whisked it together with a whisper of kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. He cooked rice and sautéed some kale.
Using a flexible metal spatula, he gently pulled the fillets from the fish and laid them on plates and applied some sauce alongside them with a painterly stroke, as if in a restaurant. Home cooks can substitute a dollop, or a splat. It looks almost as fine. It tastes exactly as excellent. That was the plan all along.
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