Learn how to make braised fennel in orange sauce Sicilian citrus glazed tuna steaks with braised fennel in orange sauce recipe.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Amy Riolo and I’m making Sicilian Citrus Glazed Tuna Steaks with Braised Fennel in Orange Sauce. And in this segment we’re going to make our braised fennel in orange sauce, so let’s get started. The first thing that I’m going to do is take my skillet and put it over medium heat and then I’m going to add my olive oil. This is about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and I’m going to use that to coat the bottom of my pan. You can see when the pan started to get these really nice ripples in it and you start to smell the scent of the olive oil, that’s how you know when it’s ready to add your next ingredient. So the very next ingredient which I’m going to add is out fennel, now these are pieces of fennel which I’ve already quartered and chopped. But a lot of people are unfamiliar with fennel. So this is a whole fennel looks like, sometimes its marketed in the supermarket as sweet anis, anis or sweet fennel for most recipes what are just the bulb. This is the bulb portion so you would chop it off right here and then cut it into quarters without using this core and that’s what we have in our pan ready to go. So now that our pan and our oil are nice and hot let’s go ahead and add the fennel quarters to them. I want to make sure that your fennel is dry as possible just to minimize a lot of excess splatter. Fennel is actually a plant which dates backs about 3,000 years in the Mediterranean region. And it’s really a digestive aid and a breath freshener, everywhere as far east as India and as far west as France. So it’s wonderful thing to have it in your diet it’s actually full of essential minerals and vitamin c and phosphorous. Very nutrient rich low in calorie and it's also full in fiber, so they say that fennel is a dieter’s friend. So I’m just turning this fennel around making sure that they get coated in the olive oil and we’re just getting them cook for a few minutes. I’m going to add some of our salt and pepper to this dish, now because the fennel is getting cooked and stock we don’t need to add too much salt. Just a little bit of salt, keep that in mind whenever that your recipe have a lot of herbs, a lot of stock, a lot of other kinds of ingredients like cheese. You don’t have to add too much too much salt better to add just a little bit and then taste it at the end and add more if you need it, that’s kind of how to make a more helpful recipe. So we’ve got our freshly ground black pepper, now the next thing that I’m going to do in to kind of enhance the taste of our fennel. It is very common and very traditional to cook fresh fennel in fennel seeds, so what fennel seeds are these wonderful little seeds that are literally just a seeds from the fennel plant. And what I’m going to do is that I’m going to crushed them in our mortar and pestle and by crushing them I’m not only making them smaller and palatable, but I'm also releasing a lot of the essential oil that are in the seeds themselves. So they’re release a lot of their aroma, I can start to smell them already may taste absolutely wonderful and then really enhance the flavor of this fennel dish that we had here. The ancient Romans used to use fennel seeds to preserve food. So what I’m going to do now that our fennel is nice and brown caramelize we got the seeds in there and our seasonings, I’m going to actually take a cup of reduced sodium chicken stock and add that in. And what’s going to happen is, the fennel as it cooks just going to release more of its liquorish like anis flavor, and it’s going to combine with the savory flavors of the chicken stock and it’s going to be very delicious. I’m adding just about enough to cover. And I’m also going to add our one half of cup of orange juice and I’m going to turn this flame up to high and let it come to a boil. And this is just going to mix the flavors in together and to allow them to really incorporate. Now I’m going to add our freshly chopped parsley, this is about one cup and as you can see our mixture starting to boil. So now that our mixtures’ boiling, I’m going to turn it down to a simmer and we let it simmer for about 10 minutes and when we come back. We’ll garnish our braised fennel in orange sauce and we’ll plate it up with our Sicilian citrus glazed tuna steaks.