Name: Bouillabaisse (Provençal Rockfish Soup with Rouille)
Prep time: 45 min
Cook time: 1 h
Total time: 1 h 45 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: French
Ingredients: 1 kg small rockfish; 300 g conger eel; 400 g rockfish or sea bass; 300 g monkfish; 400 g gurnard or scorpionfish; 300 g mussels; 8 prawns; 120 ml olive oil; 2 onions; 1 leek; 0.5 fennel bulb; 6 cloves garlic; 4 ripe tomatoes; 0.5 tsp saffron; 1 strip orange peel; 4 sprigs thyme; 2 bay leaves; 400 g potatoes; 3 cloves garlic; 0.5 tsp coarse salt; 50 g boiled potato; 1 pinch saffron; 0.25 tsp cayenne; 1 egg yolk; 150 ml olive oil; 12 slices baguette

Ingredients

4servings

Fish for the broth (serves 4)
small rockfish · several kinds, heads and bones included — scorpionfish, gurnard, wrasse, rockfish trim1 kg
conger eel · optional; it gives the broth body300 g
Fish to eat (three kinds or more)
rockfish or sea bass · in large pieces400 g
monkfish · the firmest, so it goes in first300 g
gurnard or scorpionfish400 g
mussels · debearded and scrubbed300 g
prawns8
Broth
olive oil · it looks like a lot; half of it emulsifies into the broth120 ml
onions · roughly chopped2
leek1
fennel bulb · central to the Provençal flavour0.5
garlic6 cloves
ripe tomatoes · or 400g tinned whole tomatoes4
saffron0.5 tsp
orange peel · no white pith; easy to leave out and it should not be1 strip
thyme4 sprigs
bay leaves2
potatoes · in 2cm rounds400 g
Rouille
garlic3 cloves
coarse salt0.5 tsp
boiled potato · or 30g bread soaked in the broth50 g
saffron1 pinch
cayenne0.25 tsp
egg yolk1
olive oil · poured in a thread, very slowly150 ml
To serve
baguette · toasted and rubbed with garlic12 slices

Steps

Prepare the small rockfish. Take the gills and guts out — left in, they put bitterness and a fishy edge straight into the broth. Scaling can be rough, and all the heads and bones go in: that is where the body of the broth comes from.
Soften the onion, leek, fennel and garlic in 60ml of the olive oil for 8 minutes, taking no colour. Browned, they muddy the colour of the broth.
⏲ 8 min
Add the rockfish and press them with a spatula for 5 minutes, until the flesh starts to break up, then add the tomatoes, saffron, orange peel, thyme and bay.
⏲ 5 min
Pour in 2 litres of hot water and boil hard for 20 minutes. Not a gentle simmer — the name of the dish is the instruction (bouillir, to boil), and the hard boil breaks the fish down and emulsifies the olive oil into the broth, which is how it turns thick and opaque with no cream and no flour. It is the opposite of the usual rule for fish stock.
⏲ 20 min
Pass it through a sieve, pressing hard with a ladle to get everything out. Once through a coarse sieve, then a fine one. Discard the pressed bones. This broth is the dish.
Make the rouille. Pound the garlic with the coarse salt to a paste, mix in the boiled potato, saffron, cayenne and yolk, then add the olive oil in a thread, very slowly, stirring constantly, until it holds like mayonnaise. Poured in at once it splits.
⏲ 5 min
Cook the potato rounds in the strained broth for 12 minutes. Stir in the remaining 60ml olive oil and season. The seasoning is settled here — once the fish is in, stirring is not an option.
⏲ 12 min
Add the fish firmest first: monkfish, then rockfish, then gurnard, two minutes apart, and the mussels and prawns last. Six to eight minutes in all. Keep the broth just below a boil and do not stir the fish — stirring breaks it up.
⏲ 8 min
Toast the baguette slices and rub them with a cut clove of garlic.
Serve the broth first, with rouille spread on the croutons and floated in it. The fish and potatoes follow on a separate plate. That is the order in Marseille restaurants, and there is a practical reason for it: in one bowl the fish sits in hot broth and goes on cooking.

Tips & Variations

Variations

Bouillabaisse borgne: no fish at all — eggs poached in the garlic and saffron broth. The name means "one-eyed bouillabaisse", and it is what you make on a day with no fish.
Bourride: the same Provençal fish soup thickened by whisking aïoli into the broth instead of serving rouille alongside. The garlic sauce goes into the liquid rather than onto the bread.
Without potatoes: argued about within Marseille itself. The 1980 charter includes them, but the older way is broth and bread only.
Without mussels and prawns: shellfish are not required in the Marseille version. They look impressive and they tip the broth towards crustacean, which covers the rockfish flavour.
The next day: the broth alone keeps two days and improves. Reheated fish falls apart, so keep the broth and eat the fish on the day.

Tips

Which fish is the important line in the ingredient list. Bouillabaisse is not a dish made with "any fish" but with several kinds of bony, gelatinous rockfish. Three at least, four if you can. The 1980 Charte de la bouillabaisse marseillaise exists precisely because restaurants were selling anything at all under the name.
Do not use salmon, tuna or mackerel. Oily fish point the flavour somewhere else and cloud the broth. The fat in this dish is olive oil's job.
Boiling hard is the rule here. Stocks and broth says to keep a fish stock at a gentle simmer, and bouillabaisse deliberately breaks that. Without the hard boil the oil and water never combine and the broth stays thin and clear (emulsions and pan sauces).
It is the opposite rule to clam chowder. Chowder is also a soup where the broth is the whole dish, but there the clam liquor must never boil — boiling splits the dairy and toughens the clams. Bouillabaisse has no dairy and does have oil to emulsify, so boiling is the point. Two soups, the same sentence about broth, opposite instructions.
Keep the orange peel in. People remember the saffron and the fennel and drop this, and it is where a lot of the Provençal character comes from (blooming spices).
Rouille is a component, not a garnish. It is an emulsion like mayonnaise, so the oil goes in slowly; if it splits, start a fresh yolk and beat the split sauce into it a little at a time.
The fish goes in for the last eight minutes. Build the broth first and add the fish just before serving. Cooked in from the start it disintegrates into the liquid and there is nothing left to serve on the second plate.
Finishing with a crouton and something spread on it is the same structure as French onion soup: one melts gruyère on the bread, the other spreads rouille. In both, the broth itself is plain and what goes on at the table completes it.
History: the pot Marseille fishermen boiled up on the quay from the rockfish nobody would buy. A dish invented to avoid wasting cheap fish is now an expensive one, which is why in 1980 a charter had to be written to pin down what goes in it.

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