It’s not an everyday pairing this one: lightly spiced salmon paired with bitter-yet-buttery confit chicory. And it needs a bit of kit too, namely a sous-vide machine and a blowtorch. But the results really are worth it.
Category: fish
I love reading In Search of Heston’s recipes. United by our passion for all things Blumenthal-flavoured, he goes the whole hog in attempting to recreate Heston’s entire recipe index. And he really pushes the boat out to make them as accurately to the original text as possible.
One of his recent posts was Heston’s fish pie. I’ve kind-of blogged about this before. Phil went all the way and made every element, taking him over two days and eventually eating the finished dish at 3.38am one bank holiday Monday morning. It sounded quite the ordeal. He also related how fellow Blumenthaler Kita had a similarly delayed dinner, with many steps resulting in an excellent meal for a lot of effort.
I wanted to pay tribute to that effort, and capture the spirit of the fish pie but have a version that could be made for a weekday dinner. So here’s my beached salmon: the major components of Heston’s fish pie reduced (dare I say deconstructed?) to a portion of salmon with pommes purees, sauce and crunch topping (the “sand”).
The potatoes take about 45 minutes, but the vast majority of it is unattended. Whilst it may sound long-winded with the two-stage temperatures, it’s the only way to achieve the silky-smoothness this recipe deserves. The salmon is simple, enhanced only by miso in lieu of a full cure. The sauce is the main binding ingredient and that’s where the power is. With a sauce rich in vermouth (Cinzano is one of the few spirits we always have in the cupboard) and cream it gives a luxurious finish. You can add improvements yourself with the quality of the stock you use, using fish offcuts if available.
It may not be 3 days worth of toil and can’t hope to compare to the original, but hopefully there’s enough flavours in to call back to the Heston recipe.
beached salmon (or, heston’s fish pie simplified)
Ingredients
_For the salmon:_
- 2 salmon steaks
- 1 tablespoon white miso paste
_For the sauce:_
- 1 onion finely sliced
- 1 star anise
- 1 clove of garlic crushed
- 20 ml vermouth
- 20 ml white wine
- 100 ml fish stock
- 50 ml double cream
_For the pommes purees:_
- 200 g Charlotte potatoes peeled and sliced into 5mm slices
- 50 g unsalted butter
- 30 ml whole milk
- 1 egg yolk
- 10 g Comte cheese grated
- 1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard
- 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
_For the sand topping:_
- 10 g panko breadcrumbs
- 1 nori leaf
- Pinch salt
_To serve:_
- 1 teaspoon chopped parsley
Instructions
- Marinate the salmon first: spread the miso paste evenly over the fish and put to one side until needed.
- For the potatoes, rinse the slices well under cold water to remove the excess starch. Fill a pan with water and heat to 80C. Add the potatoes and maintain at 70C for 30 minutes.
- In a small pan, add a little oil and fry the panko until golden brown. Drain on kitchen paper and crush in a pestle and mortar with the nori and salt. Set aside until needed.
- While the potatoes cook, get on with your sauce. Gently fry the onions in a little butter with the star anise until softened, and then add the garlic. Crank up the heat and add the vermouth and wine. Bubble away, deglazing the pan and reduce by half. Add the stock and cream, remove the star anise and once it hits the boil reducing to a gentle simmer.
- When the potatoes are ready, drain and rinse then return them to the pan. Add more water, add salt and bring to the boil, simmering for 15 minutes. Put the butter, milk, cheese, mustard and Worcestershire sauce in a bowl and set a sieve over it. When the 15 minutes are up, drain the potatoes well and push through the sieve into the waiting seasonings. Beat well with a spatula to combine and taste for seasoning. If it's ready before everything else, return to the saucepan to keep warm
- Get a frying pan on medium-hot for your salmon. Fry on the skin side for 4 minutes and flip over until done to your liking.
- To assemble the dish, add a scoop of potatoes. Add your fish. Check the sauce for seasoning and pour over. Add a sprinkle of parsley and plenty of 'sand'. Serve with mangetout or asparagus.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with quite a few people of Nigerian descent; without fail every one of them at some point has brought in jollof rice from home for lunch. This is a slight play on it. Usually the rice is simmered in tomatoes but this can be time consuming so I kept the parts separate until the last minute. I blended it with a gift from a colleague, a coriander-heavy blend of garam masala that he likes. The result is a spicy-sweet rich dish, topped with some aniseedy pollock. Satisfying, homely stuff and it’s easy to see why jollof is a Nigerian family staple.
Pollock with jollof-style masala rice (serves 1 but would be great in bulk):
1 pollock fillet
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 handful chopped onion (I like to use frozen for convenience)
1 cinnamon stick (I like Cinnamon Hill)
2 cloves
1 star anise
1 handful basmati rice
2 tablespoons chopped tomatoes
1 tablespoon garam masala
Lemon slices, to garnish
- Preheat the oven to 170°C. Get a saucepan and a frying pan over medium heats.
- Lay the fish on a piece of tin foil, drizzle over a little oil, salt pepper and the fennel seeds. Wrap up and bake for 15 – 18 mins until cooked through.
- Heat a little oil in the saucepan and add the onion, cinnamon, cloves and star anise. After they’ve had a minute add the onion and stir fry until softened.
- Meanwhile add the tomatoes and garam masala to the frying pan and bring to a simmer,
- Back at the onion, crank up the heat and add the rice with a pinch of salt. Toss well to coat in the aromatic oil, and then cover with boiling water to twice the level of the rice. Simmer for 10 minutes or until the rice is done, then turn off the heat and cover while you finish everything else.
- Check the tomatoes – they may need a little more salt or sugar to balance everything out. When ready, stir into the rice, top with the fish and drizzle with lemon.
I’m certain people who cook a lot, like me, ponder something along these lines: when you really enjoy a dinner, one that you made, what made it special? Was it the choice ingredients, or the exotic technique you used… or was it the company? Heston talks often about this theory – the atmosphere of a meal – and how you can recapture it. It’s often impossible.
I love having friends over for dinner. This occasion was a reunion of very old colleagues who had been through various trials together and come out as good friends on the other side. I took the rare opportunity to cook some fish and heaved a great pile of broadly-Asian-flavoured tuna and rice in front of us, and we all dug in. I know I cooked it, but I really enjoyed the meal. And I’d like to think it was the rare tuna, the fruity rice, or savoury greens, but I suspect that took a sideline to tales of disastrous bike rides, hasty pool tournaments and broken chopsticks. That’s what I enjoyed.
Tuna with greens and coconut rice (serves 3):
1 large mugful of rice
1 heaped tablespoon instant coconut milk powder
450g diced tuna (sustainably sourced, please)
2 tablespoons coriander seeds
1 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 tablespoon sesame seeds
A few mixed green crunchy veg, e.g. tenderstem broccoli, sugar snap peas
1 large bag of spinach
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
Soy sauce, to serve
Bunch of coriander, chopped
Chilli flakes, to serve
Lime wedges, to serve
- Get a saucepan over a medium heat and add the rice, coconut powder and twice the amount of boiling water to rice. Cover and simmer while you do everything else. When the water has subsided taste and check for seasoning.
- Get another frying pan very hot. While it heats up, crush the seeds along with salt and pepper together lightly. Scatter on to a chopping board and roll the tuna pieces all over to cover. When the pan is hot add a dash of oil and then stir fry the tuna for about 90 secs, until all sides are coloured. Remove to one side.
- Add the crunchy veg to the pan and toss for a couple of minutes. Turn the heat down to medium and add the oyster sauce, and then the spinach. Toss together briefly until the spinach wilts. Serve everything in a great pile, adding a drizzle of soy sauce and a sprinkle of coriander to everything, and plonk chilli and lime on the side for guests to pimp their own.