Perfect as a fillet to serve with your favorite sides or as a quick-cooking protein to use for sandwiches and tacos, broiled rockfish is a healthy seafood option that gives you easygoing versatility throughout the week. Knowing how to broil rockfish the right way ensures that you’ll end up with a tender, flaky white fillet of fish every time.
Broiling is one of the quickest and easiest ways to prepare rockfish. All you have to do is put a fillet or two in a pan, then slide it underneath a hot broiler where the fish will be cooked in well under 5 minutes.
And P.S., since our rockfish portions are cut into thin fillets, they also defrost in no time, making them one of the speediest options to work with when you need ready-to-cook seafood fast.
How to Flavor Your Rockfish
While relatively mild, rockfish has some sweet, nutty notes that make it a less delicately flavored option than other wild-caught varieties like cod or halibut. That means that if you’re going bold by broiling the fish, go bold in your marinade or rub as well.
Blackening spices do well under the broiler, as does miso butter spread on a fast-cooking variety of seafood like rockfish — miso butter will burn if it’s left under the heat for too long. You can even try topping rockfish with a butter-breadcrumb mixture, pressing it onto the fillets like a crust. Don’t forget to pat your fillets dry before preparing them with dry ingredients, and hold off on adding any salt until just before broiling the fish.
For wet marinades, simpy pat the fish dry before cooking to remove excess moisture from the surface.
Setting Up Your Broiler
You need to use a proper broiler that gets hot enough to give your rockfish an intense blast of heat in a short period of time. Under a cooler source of heat, the rockfish is more prone to getting dried out before it can be cooked through, so make sure you’re using a broiler in a real oven, not the one in your toaster oven that merely approximates the real thing. Fast and flaming hot is exactly what you want from this cooking method, especially with rockfish as the fillets are relatively thin and incredibly lean.
Make sure your oven rack is as high up as possible before you turn on the heat. This usually sets up your rockfish to be 4 to 6 inches away from the broiler element, which is far enough that the rockfish won’t burn but close enough that it will get some serious indirect exposure to heat. Once you turn your broiler on high, don’t get impatient as it preheats. Give it plenty of time to do its thing.
Set the rockfish on a broiler-safe baking dish, oven-safe skillet, or a cast iron pan. If you’re cooking more than one fillet, arrange the fillets in a single layer to ensure even cooking.
A Quick Broil
Slide your pan of rockfish beneath the broiler and set your timer for 3 minutes. After 3 minutes is up, take a peek at the doneness by flaking the thickest part of the fillet with a fork. The fillet should flake easy and be opaque all the way through. You’ll probably notice that the fillet has shrunk in size, since the proteins in the fish will have pulled together under the heat.
If the fish isn’t yet flaky, leave the pan under the broiler for another 30 seconds and check again. This should give them plenty of time to cook through — if your broiler is hot enough, you generally won’t need more than 4 minutes for the fillets of rockfish to finish cooking.
Serve immediately, or cover to keep warm.
