Ixta Belfrage’s Spicy Fish Soup with Rouille
A bright, zesty riff on a classic bouillabaisse, this fish soup and rouille are full of bold flavours. Recipe by Ixta Belfrage. Photos by Emli Bendixen.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing our Spring Recipe Supplement, comprising three soup recipes by some of our favourite cooks. Here, Ixta Belfrage draws inspiration from a bouillabaisse she ate in Marseille but infuses it with the flavours of Italy, Mexico and Turkey. The resulting fish soup – and complementary garlic-heavy rouille – are full of vibrant flavour. To read the rest of the Spring Recipe Supplement, please click below:
Melek Erdal’s lamb and rice dugun çorbası
Songsoo Kim’s rampini doenjang guk (flowering spring greens soup)
All the articles in the Spring Recipe Supplement are paywalled. To view them, you can subscribe to Vittles for £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.
Spicy Fish Soup with Hot Red Pepper Rouille
Last year, I ate a bouillabaisse at Restaurant Michel, a classic Marseille establishment where the menu is reassuringly small and the waiters who’ve worked there for decades buzz around the room as if electrified by nicotine (and possibly cocaine). It wasn’t the best fish soup of my life, but I had a wonderful time: the artistry of the presentation, the brilliant hospitality and the raw-garlic-heavy rouille were impossible not to love.
French cuisine tends to be bound by rules of what ingredients can and cannot be used in a classic dish. Traditionally, bouillabaisse and soupe de poisson are made with fish, shellfish, fennel, saffron and orange peel, with fresh tomato being used only sparingly, for a hint of colour and acidity. In my humble opinion, fish soups that are more tomato-paste heavy (like the ones you might find in Italy) are far more exciting. While some chefs may consider the use of tomato paste to achieve deep flavour to be ‘cheating’, I use it with reckless abandon in my own recipe for spicy fish soup, which I’m sharing here.
The stock for this soup relies on the power of aci biber salçasi (Turkish hot red pepper paste), tomato paste and spices to form the flavour base. The result is a rich, tangy and slightly sweet soup. Some sticklers may protest that this is more a soup with fish in it rather than a fish soup. Fine.
To my mind, a fish soup is incomplete without a rouille, specifically one with unsociable amounts of raw garlic in it. So, I’m also sharing a recipe for a hot red pepper rouille that perfectly complements the dish. Like the soup, the rouille contains aci biber salçasi, along with saffron and lime juice to make it pop.
These recipes hold no national or cultural allegiances, borrowing inspiration from Italy (the tomato-rich base), Turkey (the red pepper paste) and Mexico (guajillo chilli, cinnamon, lime). The moment I most look forward to is when you’ve just added the rouille to the hot soup: the two begin to meld into each other, but both elements are still distinct, marbling. Add a squeeze of lime, and it’s a party.
Spicy Fish Soup with Hot Red Pepper Rouille
Serves 4
Time 50 mins