On Mon, 7 Sep 2009 16:03:06 -0400, "Don Phillipson"
wrote:

"Todd" wrote in message ...

A friend of mine says he loves Garlic on his trout.
I would rather not waste a pan of good trout
trying this out. Any one have an comments?
Also, would you bother brining them?
. . .
My typical recipe: olive oil, butter, rosemary,
salt, pepper

1. You can try garlic in other forms, e.g. garlic
bread, garlic in spaghetti sauce, and thus decide
whether you want to try it on trout. The main question
is whether you want to taste trout (enhanced by being
rubbed beforehand with garlic) or trout and garllic
(two flavours combined.)

2. Brining is prerequisite to smoking (strong brine
for cold smoke, mild brine for hot smoke). Before
other cooking methods, it seems likely to make
the food too salty.

Why both olive oil and butter? (I prefer bacon fat to
either for pan-fried trout, but fry eggs etc. in OO
rather than butter.)

Typically, using both butter and olive oil can serve one or both of two
purposes. There are a couple of practical reasons: olive oil has a higher
smoke point than (unclarified) butter, and so, heating a pan, putting in some
olive oil, and then, some butter is less likely to "burn." Also, you can do the
saute with the OO, and then, after the saute is complete, if you are making a
"pan sauce," the butter can be used at the end to thicken and enrich the sauce,
ala a beurre blanc, etc. The latter is ties into the second reason - taste and
mouth feel.

The former practical reason is one reason to clarify butter, ala ghee, etc., as
it is the milk solids that cause the butter to "burn"/brown at lower temps,
although this browning characteristic is also intentionally used, where this
browning is intended as part of the dish/sauce - beurre noisette/noir.

HTH,
R