🇫🇷 France · Provence and Languedoc (Sète)
BourrideProvençal fish and aioli soup
A creamy fish soup of white fish, often monkfish, cooked with vegetables and white wine and bound with a generous amount of aïoli, so that it is strongly garlicky.
Origin and history
Bourride is a creamy fish dish bound with aïoli. The Hérault tourist board describes the Sète version, bourride sétoise or bourride de baudroie, as a modest dish that fishermen made from their unsold catch, cooked in a pot of seawater; the name comes from the Provençal word boulido, meaning boiled.
Make it at home
- Makes
- 4 servings
- Total time
- 1 h 15 min
- Hands-on
- 45 min
Ingredients
- 1 kg2.2 lb monkfish tail (lotte, baudroie), skinned, cut in large pieces, bones kept for the broth if you can
- 2 leeks, white parts only, cut small
- 1 onion, chopped
- 3 carrots, cut small
- 1 stalk celery, cut small
- 2 potatoes, peeled, in chunks
- 1 clove garlic
- 2 tbsp olive oil, for the vegetables
- 120 ml1/2 cup dry white wine, about half a glass
- 500 ml2 cups water, enough to just cover the vegetables
- 1 pinch saffron, optional
- 2 egg yolks, for the aïoli
- 6 cloves garlic, crushed to a paste, for the aïoli
- 200 ml3/4 cup olive oil, for the aïoli
- 1 tsp lemon juice
- salt and black pepper, to taste
- toasted bread or boiled potatoes or rice, to serve
Method
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1. Make the aïoli: pound the garlic to a smooth paste in a mortar with a pinch of salt, add the egg yolks, then drizzle in the olive oil, stirring in one direction, until thick. Stir in the lemon juice and chill.
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2. Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a wide casserole and cook the leeks, onion, carrots, celery and garlic gently for about 15 minutes, stirring often, until soft.
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3. Add the potatoes, saffron if using, the wine and the water, season, and simmer for about 10 minutes.
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4. Lay the monkfish pieces on top, cover and simmer gently for about 15 minutes, until the fish is just cooked through.
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5. Lift the fish and vegetables onto a warm dish and keep them warm. Take the pot off the heat and let the broth cool for a minute.
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6. Whisk the aïoli into the warm broth in the pot (or in a saucepan) over very low heat for about 2 minutes, never letting it boil, until it turns silky and just thick enough to coat a spoon.
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7. Pour the sauce over the fish and vegetables, or serve it in bowls with toasted bread, and eat at once.
Notes
- The Hérault tourist board describes bourride sétoise (also bourride de baudroie) as built on monkfish, small cut vegetables, a splash of white wine and aïoli stirred in at the end; it says another white fish is acceptable in a pinch but rockfish would be a serious mistake. It is often compared with bouillabaisse, which it differs from in many ways.
- Do not let the broth boil once the aïoli goes in, or the egg yolk will split.
- Recipes differ: the iDealwine version cooks potatoes with saffron and serves the sauce over fish and potatoes, and Patricia Lousada's recipe in The Cooking of Provence uses a stock of fish heads and bones with leek, onion, carrot, orange zest, fennel seed and herbs, and works with halibut, whiting or grey mullet.
- Fennel seed and orange zest are not in the Sète recipe; they belong to Patricia Lousada's stock, if you want to try that version.
- The name comes from the Provençal boulido, 'boiled', according to the Hérault tourist board.
Adapted from Hérault Tourisme: Bourride à la sétoise (recipe), iDealwine: Bourride de baudroie à la sétoise (aïoli proportions, scaled down), and Patricia Lousada, The Cooking of Provence (1995).
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