The Front Line Food Diary (Salmon with Beurre Blanc and Confit Fennel)

A Lightly Cooked Fillet of Salmon with Beurre Blanc, Confit Fennel and Yellow Beans.

At first Helen looked pretty satisfied with the ingredients list. We had made a pact to start cooking healthier meals during the week and on the surface this looked just about perfect. Her opinion changed however when she witnessed me making the beurre blanc.

My beurre blanc recipe goes roughly like this 

2 finely diced shallots

Good glass and a half of nice white wine

150ml of white wine vinegar

500-750g unsalted butter (2-3 bars)

salt and pepper

No prizes for guessing which ingredient ruined the pact. 

I owe this recipe to one of my teachers at Tante Marie, its not actually a school recipe but he was a chef at The Waterside Inn  so it's unlikely to be a bad place to start.

Put your shallots in a frying pan with the white wine and reduce rapidly until you get a syrupy consistency (almost nothing left) then do the same with the vinegar. When the vinegar gets to the syrupy stage add the butter in small pieces (one at a time) and whisk with all your might. Only adding new butter when all the previous lot has been fully emulsified. This will take some time and some whisking power. Alternatively you could lower the heat and do it in a more casual fashion, but where's the fun in that ?

If it splits then you can just add a little cold water off the heat and whisk it in. Stop adding butter when it feels and tastes right...season to taste.

You wont be able to keep you sauce for much longer than the day you make it but it will keep at room temperature for some time. When your ready reheat it and maybe add a little more water if necessary. 

In case you are interested the Salmon was cooked in prawn infused oil at 48oC in a water bath and the skin was fried separately. If you don't have a water bath you could do much the same thing if your oven goes down to 50oC. 

If I do it again I would substitute the fennel for something else. It was great by itself but just didn't work well in the dish. It felt like a loud guest at a dinner party. What it had to say could well have been interesting but whatever it was it was distracting you from the rest of the room, so by default became annoying and unnecessary. Something sweet or neutral would have worked much better.

Comments

[Miranda]

First of all, I enjoy your site and posts.
Secondly,Yum. This looks FANTASTIC. I love Salmon.

[Cookin' Canuck]

What a lovely dish! Yes, I'd imagine that amount of butter broke the pact pretty readily. But oh - so good!

[Sig]

Love this recipe combining a few of my favourite ingredients, nice one!