Tag: fry

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

180. Seared Salmon with Balsamic Glaze p.290


The recipe

Jacques Pépin said it best, if you’re going to fry fish, try to do it at the neighbours’ house. I was working from home the day I made this dish, and my dining companion wasn’t getting back until 9 pm so I decided to make fish for lunch. As regular readers know she’s not entirely comfortable with things that come from the sea, fish least of all. Salmon is her most hated fish, so I try to be polite about cooking it when she’s not around. The dish is as simple as it gets, requiring just a few pantry staples, and some nice Salmon fillets (I quartered the recipe and just made a fillet for me). All the recipe involves is seasoning the fillets with salt and pepper, pan frying them until they’re just cooked through, and once the salmon is out of the pan deglazing it with a mixture of balsamic vinegar, water, lemon juice, and light brown sugar. Once this sauce is reduced it’s spooned over the salmon and served.

What the book fails to mention is the billowing clouds of fish smoke that will fill your poorly ventilated apartment, and that the first thing your dining companion will say when she gets home is “gah, fish!”, or that your pillows will smell like fried fish, and that a week later the kitchen pantry will still have a faint fishy odor. The fish is seared over highest heat in a non-stick skillet (more cancer, yay!), and it started smoking right away. After the recommended 4 minutes the skin side of the salmon was black and charred, not seared. I reduced the heat a bit to cook the top side of the fillet, and got it out of the pan once it was nicely browned. When I cut into it the fish was still pretty much raw in the thicker part of the fillet. I only served myself the skinnier side which had cooked through. I made the pan sauce, and brushed a bit of it onto my fish, but it picked up a lot of the burned flavour from the pan, and I over reduced it as well (that pan was really hot).

I suspect that my modifications to the recipe got me into trouble. I was supposed to cook 4 fillets in a 12 inch skillet, but I did one fillet in an 8 inch skillet. With less fish per square inch to cool the skillet down the fish may have burned faster. I think my fillet was a more like 8 ounces than the recommended 6, which would explain the under cooking.

Despite the snafus, the fish tasted quite good. I peeled off the blackened skin, and the meat of the thinner half of the fillet was nicely cooked. Even with the slightly burned flavour the pan sauce worked well, it was a touch sweet for my taste, and if I made it again I’d increase the lemon juice, but it did compliment the salmon’s flavour nicely.

I guess this is one of those recipes that you can’t vary from too much. Many Epicurious posters appear to have had success, so I’m going to assume that this is just me. Make sure to cook the right number and size of fillets and you’ll probably be OK. Even done properly your house is going to stink though. I usually try to do this kind of smelly frying on the side burner of the grill, to better let the neighbours enjoy the fishy smell. Alas, I was out of gas the day I decided to make this. I was happy with the flavours of this dish, and it was dead simple, and lightning fast, but I was less happy with the fine film of fish oil that settled onto every horizontal surface in the whole house. I’ll plan on trying this one again and following the instructions more closely next time. For now I’ll give it at

Categories
The Book Vegetables

156. Dry-Cooked String Beans p.523


I couldn’t find a recipe for this one online.

I was in a frying mood the night I made these beans and the onion rings. The combination of a fried appetizer, and a fried main course was just a little too much. This stir fry was more than greasy enough all by itself.

In this dish trimmed green beans are deep fried in a wok for 30 seconds, then drained. You then drain off most of the oil, and build a stir fry starting with garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, then add ground pork. Once the pork is browned the beans go back in to reheat. A mixture of sugar, salt, soy sauce, sake, and sesame oil is then poured over top along with a handful of scallion greens and stirred to coat. Put this on a bed of sticky rice and you’ve got dinner.

The stir fry itself was totally delicious, it was an excellent balance of ingredients, just spicy enough, and wonderfully complex and arromatic. However, the stir fried beans were a bit weird and greasy. I trimmed the ends of the beans, so there was an open tube down the middle of them. Some of those tubes filled with oil during frying, and made the dish much greasier than I would have liked. It’s possible that my oil temperature dropped too far, and the pressure of escaping steam wasn’t enough to keep the oil out. If so, more oil, or smaller batches of beans would have taken care of the problem. The recipe says that the point of the deep frying is to lock in the coulour of the beans, but blanching, and shocking them would have done the same thing. The exterior of the beans took on a funny wrinkled texture, but they remained firm and crisp, and nicely green.

I’d happily make an adapted version of this recipe, but I think the deep fried green beans are better left behind. There are lots of recipes for dry-cooked beans out there, so I’ll presume it’s a well respected technique, and suggesting that they kind of suck is probably insulting someone’s Grandmother’s cooking, but they just weren’t my bag. The rest of the dish was excellent, and simply replacing the frying for a blanching would probably solve my only criticism of the recipe. If it had been less oily, it would have earned 4.5 mushrooms, but as it is, I can’t give it more than three.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

155. Fried Onion Rings p.552


I can’t find the recipe for this one online.

Way back in the beginning of The Project, I mentioned that I’ve been a little gun shy about deep frying in my kitchen ever since I put some very wet potato wedges into a pot of massively overheated oil and turned my stove into a fireball. I try to do most of my frying outside on the barbecue’s side burner instead. The thought of raining fiery death upon the downstairs neighbors innocently sitting on their balconies hardly bothers me at all. It has the additional advantage of not stinking up the whole house. I take as many of my stinky cooking projects outside as I can, the hipsters next door may not appreciate it, but keeping my dining companion happy is much more important.

I’ve never made onion rings before, but I’ve eaten my fair share. I like rings with a thin crisp coating of batter, that stays attached to the onion that it doesn’t slither out along with your first bite. The batter should be flavourful on it’s own, but not excessively seasoned. Simplicity is a good thing, but these rings may have been a bit too simple. The recipe calls for sliced onions to be dipped in milk, and dredged in flour and salt, then fried at 370F for a couple of minutes. They passed the thin, crisp, and well attached to the onions test, but they were a little lacking in the flavour department.

I appreciate the minimalism of the recipe, lots of other onion rings recipes call for eggs, baking soda, cornmeal, bread crumbs, and other nonsense. A simple mixture of flour, salt, and a liquid should be quite sufficient. I would have preferred the liquid to be beer however. Using milk is nice, because you don’t have to wait for the beer to go flat before using the batter, but beer tastes so much better, and onion rings just don’t say dairy to me. I would have also preferred a little more salt mixed into the flour. Obviously you can add salt later, but it’s better when it’s in the batter. In fact, a batter would have been nice too. In this version you dip the onions in milk, dredge them in flour, dip them in milk again, then once more into the flour. It was a bit of an operation to do the double dredge, and it made a mess. Just mixing up a batter of the right consistency and sticking the rings in there wouldn’t be any harder, and it would be a lot faster.

I love that this recipe is in the vegetables section of the book. Finally my nine-year-old self’s “Eat your vegetables”, “But mom, onion rings are a vegetable” logic is getting the respect it deserves. For a first attempt at making my own rings, I was reasonably pleased with these, they were golden, crisp, and quite tasty. These aren’t the ultimate rings, but refining my perfect recipe is going to be a fun process.