Oven Baked Trout with Fennel and Zingy Lemon Sauce

Two whole baked trout on a white oval plate with roasted fennel and meyer lemon sauce

Oven Baked Trout with Fennel and Zingy Lemon Sauce

Whole trout is extremely affordable and easy to find. This is a one pan meal that comes with baked fennel that cooks on the sheet pan with the fish. Serve with a side of whole lemon chopped parsley sauce.

Course Main Course

Cuisine American

Diet Gluten Free, Low Lactose

Keyword one pan meal

Prep Time 15

Cook Time 30

Servings

Calories 498kcal

Author Agile Test Kitchen

Equipment

1 half sheet baking pan 18x13"
1 half sheet rack 18x13"

Ingredients

3 ea fennel bulbs about 1 -1 ½ lb of fennel; See Note 2 for using potatoes instead
¼ c extra virgin olive oil
2 ea whole trout, scaled and gutted about 1 lb for each trout; deboned optional; See Note 1 for alternate types of fish
salt to taste see Recipe Instructions for quantity recommendations
parsley for garnish

Fennel Butter

2 teaspoon fennel seeds, ground to powder in a mortar and pestle or coffee grinder or 1 teaspoon ground fennel
6 Tb unsalted butter at room temperature
2 teaspoon minced garlic about 3 large cloves of garlic grated on a microplane grater

Zingy Lemon Sauce

1 ea meyer lemon, unwaxed See Note 3 for using a regular (Eureka) lemon
1 Tb minced shallot
1 teaspoon salt
⅓ c extra virgin olive oil
⅓ c coarsely chopped parsley and/or mint
1 teaspoon honey or agave
a pinch of freshly ground black pepper to taste

Instructions

Place the oven rack on the lower third of the oven. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
Trim the root end off the fennel. Stand on the root end, and slice into ½ inch planks. Toss with fennel slices with the olive oil and salt to taste. (For me this is about ½ teaspoon of pink Himalayan salt.)
Spread the fennel slices onto a baking sheet in an even layer. Roast in the oven for about 15-20 minutes until the bottoms are slightly golden, and there is still some bite to the fennel.
While the fennel is roasting, mix all the fennel butter ingredients in a small bowl.
Season the trout on both sides and the inside with salt. (For me this is about ½ teaspoon of pink Himalayan salt for each trout). Slather the fennel butter onto both sides of the trout and the inside. The bottom of the trout doesn't need too much since this will just drip off during cooking.
Remove the fennel baking pan from the oven and place the baking rack over the fennel. If you don't have a rack, you can just push the fennel to the sides of the baking sheet make space for the trout. If this fennel is bunched up on top of each other, that is ok.
Lay the trout on the rack. Place in the oven and bake for 15-25 minutes until cooked through or a thermometer registers 145 degrees F in the thickest part of the fish.
Remove from the oven and serve garnished with parsley and with the zingy lemon sauce or lemon wedges on the side.

Optional Zingy Lemon Sauce

Chop the lemon into 4 wedges with the skin. Remove the seeds. Chop each wedge further into into pea sized chunks.
Mix the lemon pieces with the minced shallot and salt. Let it marinate for 10 minutes to allow the salt to soften the lemon and shallot.
Combine the lemon mixture with remaining sauce ingredients: parsley, honey, and black pepper.
Refrigerate for up to a week. Let it come to room temperature before serviing, since the oil will congeal.

Notes

This recipe makes 4 servings of about ½ lb each of bone in trout. The zingy lemon sauces makes about ¾ c of sauce.

1. Instead of trout, you could use 2 lb of another small whole fish such as snapper, rockfish, branzino, or sea bass.
2. If using potatoes instead of fennel, cut into small chunks, about 1 ½ inch dice. Cook for at least 30 minutes instead of 20 minutes for the fennel. They should be cooked through before adding the fish to the pan.
3. If using a regular lemon instead of a Meyer lemon, (which is a tiny bit sweeter and less acidic), use an additional ½ teaspoon of honey.
4. Besides using as fresh trout as possible, leave the butter out a few hours or the night before, so it's really soft when you slather it on the skin.
5. Make the zingy lemon sauce up to 3 days ahead of time. Let it come to room temperature before serving.
6. Use the convection cooking option in the oven, if you don't mind dirtying the oven with flying molecules of butter. The skin will get a wee bit crispier but not a huge difference.
7. Because of the butter on the skin, it will burn easily if you broil this under high heat.

Recipe adapted from The Cook You Want to Be by Andy Baraghani.

Nutrition