Camacho Watcho

To ring in the New Year, Kyle and I decided to try something new and fun for our dinner party. Kyle had seen a recipe on the Food Network for salt crusted whole red snapper and wanted to try it…a perfect opportunity to start the year with an adventure. So we invited some friends over for dinner and games but didn’t tell them what we would be serving so it would be a surprise.

The first order of business was finding whole red snapper. Unfortunately I waited until New Years Eve day to start calling around to stores so the supply was limited. I lucked out, though, and found a couple 1.5 pound beauties at the Midtown Global Market. They were already scaled, gutted and had the fins cut off so when I got them home I just needed to rinse with water and dry to finish up the cleaning.

We stuffed them with lemon slices (an alteration from the original recipe) and laid them on a bed of lemon slices (to keep them from sticking) and rubbed a bit of olive oil on top. We then whisked egg whites until they were stiff and folded in kosher salt. Then came the fun part…encrusting the fish with the salt mixture. Kyle got to do this since I was taking photos, but it was all I could do to keep myself from helping. It looked like fun! We popped them in the oven just before our guests arrived and set the timer for 30 minutes.


When our guests arrived Kyle turned on the oven light so they could see what the surprise was. Of course, they continued to be baffled, which was a lot of fun. After 30 minutes, we opened the oven to find two lovely browned lumps, ready to be broken into and eaten. After peeling back the salt crust, we transferred them to a serving platter and dug in.


The meat was incredibly moist and fresh tasting and tucked into tortillas with the mexican rice and mango salsa salad, it made the perfect meal. We ate and ate until there was nothing but bones left on the platter. It was both a delicious and fun meal to serve at a dinner party! I would definitely like to try it again and to try different types of fish as well.

After dinner we put out a buffet for desserts (i.e. I put out all my leftover holiday candies and sweets and told my friends they had to be gone by the end of the night) and we snacked on these for the rest of the night. Carly’s chocolate oat cookies were sweet and crispy. My friend Kate’s mom’s cookies were like pure butter and sugar melting in my mouth. And the juicy, ripened pears that Jason and Sue brought over were the perfect complement to my brie, honey and fig jam.

The rest of the night we played games, toasted with champagne and celebrated to good friends, good food and a great year!

Tags: Food, recipe

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.