Tag: water

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
Soups The Book

178. French Pea Soup – Potage-Saint-Germain p.96


The recipe

I was really excited to try this soup. I went looking for a pea soup recipe in The Book, expecting to find a hearty split pea version with ham hocks, instead I got this spring vegetable centric Potage-Saint-Germain. It wasn’t really what I was looking for that night, and the idea of mint in my soup seemed a bit weird, but one ingredient captured my imagination and I knew I had to do this recipe ASAP. That ingredient was lettuce. I’ve been toying with the idea of cooked lettuce since I saw an early Julia Child episode where she braises whole Romaine heads and serves the flaccid results. It looked terrible but she assured me that it was an excellent treatment for lettuce. As we all know, Julia’s word is law, or at least worthy of a test. I’ve never cooked lettuce in any way before, I guess it’s not that different from cooking bitter greens, bok choy or cabbage, but it seems delightfully sacrilegious and just plain wrong.

To prepare this soup you start by making croûtons with an old baguette, butter and salt in the oven. The soup starts with softening leaks in butter, then adding chicken stock and water. Once it’s boiling you add chopped Bibb lettuce, and frozen peas. As soon as the peas are tender you stir in fresh mint, and purée the soup in the blender (seriously be careful, hot pea soup was used as a viable substitute for napalm in the Nam). The soup is then seasoned with salt and pepper, and served hot topped with croûtons and lightly beaten cream.

The idea with the beaten cream was to make elegant drops, and to run a knife through them to make a stunning pattern. You can see how well that worked out for me. I think my central problem with this soup was that it was served hot. The hot soup melted the slightly whipped cream and sent it running all over the place, and it just tasted weird. Minted things are rarely served piping hot, it’s an odd juxtaposition, mint is the universal symbol of cool and refreshing, but this was a thick, hearty, hot, soup. I tried some the next day at room temperature and I was much happier. The lettuce experiment was a success though, the lettuce along with peas, leaks, and mint were the prominent flavours in the soup, and the lettuce really worked. The Book describes the flavour of the lettuce in this soup as “grassy” and I’m glad they got in a food writing buzz word there, but really it tastes exactly like uncooked lettuce, and in this case that’s a good thing. Again, hot lettuce isn’t really for me, I much preferred that flavour when the soup was cool. I like croûtons in any context, and this was no exception. The soup was thick enough that they floated easily, and didn’t get soggy.

I won’t be rushing to make this soup again, and if I did I certainly wouldn’t serve it warm. The flavours and ideas were pretty good, but the temperature was a big miss, and I wasn’t fond of the drizzled cream on top. I think the ideas behind this soup are solid, and I’m looking forward to playing with different combinations of these ingredients. Pottage-Saint-Germain is a beloved French classic, but I’m not sure it’s for me.

Categories
Basics The Book

161. Beef Stock p.928


The recipe

I can’t escape the conclusion that I’m a food snob. I take satisfaction in looking down on packaged and processed foods, and I give people points for making meals from scratch, double points if the ingredients come from an ethically superior source, and triple points if they grew the food themselves. The ultimate ridiculousness of snobbishness is that no one can live up to the standards they judge others by. I enjoy pickling my insides with Doritos, I pay outrageous prices for a tiny package of hummus that I could make at home for twelve cents, and I don’t find that organic vegetables taste better than their fertilizer drenched cousins. My ultimate sin though, is that I don’t make my own stock.

Stock making and apartment living aren’t an obvious combination. Making stock takes most of a day, so you’ll want to make up a big batch. That’s well and good if you’ve got a spare freezer in the basement, but our tiny freezer is spilling over with leftover ravioli, pesto ice cubes, and pork tenderloin that went on a crazy sale. There’s just no room for three liters of stock. The food network has filled hundreds of hours by having famous chefs repeat the refrain that the biggest reason the professionals’ food tastes better than home cooks’ is that they make their own stock (and use unconscionable amounts of butter). The sin that will get me kicked out of the food snobs annual picnic is that I don’t think that store bought broth is all that bad, in fact I like it. It’s convenient, perfectly servicable, and unless you’re using it as a gigantic component of your dish no one is going to be able to tell the difference. You usually have to reduce the salt in the rest of the recipe, because even “low sodium” broth isn’t all that low in sodium, other than that store bought broth is perfectly fine, and not at all a pain in the ass.

Making this stock was a pain in the ass. It’s not actually difficult, but it’s messy and takes six and a half hours. Your day starts with a trip to the butcher, who is happy to provide meaty beef and veal shanks, but thinks you’re an idiot when you ask him to saw them into one inch slices. He’s been making stock his whole life, and doesn’t think this step is necessary. He’s old and Italian, so he’s probably right. You then bike home with a plastic bag full of chopped up bones hanging from your handlebar, and dump them into a roasting pan along with some carrots and onions. Roast this mess, stirring occasionally for an hour at 450. Stop cursing Ruth Reichls name, because the house is starting to smell pretty good. Make a bouquet garni by tying parsley, thyme, and a bay leaf in cheesecloth. Start cursing Ruth again, because you’re going to be running the stock through a fine mesh sieve later on, and a bouquet garni is totally unnecessary. Transfer the roasted bones to a stockpot. In transferring them drop several meaty bones on the floor, this is interesting for the cat, but annoying for you. Deglaze the roasting pan, and transfer the scraped up brown bits to the stockpot along with celery, the bouquet garni, and water. Bring it to a boil, and spend half an hour skimming the nasty meat froth that rises to the surface. Disgust your girlfriend by sneaking up on her with the meat foam while she tries to read the paper. Let the stock reduce for 3 to 5 hours. Don’t leave the house, because that’s a fire hazard. Break up the monotony by skimming more foam every once in a while. Once you’ve got 8 cups of liquid left, fish out all the bits of bone and mushy vegetables, and get rid of them. Then try to set up a sieve over another big pot, and pour the stock through the sieve. Mess this up, and have the sieve fall into the filtered stock. Do it all again. Touch the hot stockpot and burn yourself. Swear for a while. Do a side to side comparison of your stock to Campbell’s low sodium beef broth, and realize that they’re really not that different. Swear some more.

This tastes like tetra-packed beef broth from the store, only it takes a long time. Homemade does have more gelatin in it, so it has a richer mouth feel, but I’m sure blooming an eighth of a teaspoon of gelatin in store bough broth would nullify this difference. Final verdict, totally not worth it. I used it as the basis for French Onion Soup, which specifically calls for making this stock, and suggests that it won’t be nearly the same with store bought, but frankly the stock wasn’t amazing in the soup. Maybe there are beef stock recipes out there that will blow the cheap, readily available, and very convenient competition away, but this is not one of them.