Brrr Blanc (Or as the french would say it: )

David's Dish Rating: GAS / 10

Hey! Happy Monday! Welcome back to the Side Dish. Our recipe of the day is a Salmon with Beurre Blanc, and our conversation of the day is about how to treat your salmon right, and what to expect when cooking it. The first thing you need to know is that salmon's a fish you have to be somewhat careful with. Too quick and you crisp up the skin before the inside's ready, too slow and you steam the inside but end up with a sad crust. So it's really a game of balancing the two. And I could tell you "Oh, switch your stove onto X heat, and use Y amount of oil" but each cut of salmon, each thickness, each pan, each stove treats it differently. So here are some of the things to look out for that'll help YOU figure it out on your own. 

Life lessons with V

Always pat down the salmon. Step 0 is to make sure it's dry, before putting it in the pan. Also, if your oil's smoking hot, it's too hot, and if it doesn't splatter a bit when you drop a droplet of water in, it's too cold. You want the salmon to be crisp in around 5-6 minutes, and you want to cook it 90% of the way on one side and 10% of the way on the other. DON'T use too much oil, if you drown the salmon in oil it'll make the outside look done much quicker, and you'll be prompted to turn it over before it's ready. A thin, small drizzle of oil is sufficient. And make sure to salt the skin before you toss it on the pan. For flavour, you can always put a clove of garlic into the pan (I either leave mine whole or crushed, but not too finely diced) and let the garlic flavour your oil and by extension your Salmon. But BE PATIENT while you're cooking. If you're not patient, you'll make the wrong decision, turn it over too early, and end up with a boring, bland piece of salmon that makes you want to never make the dish again. 

If I've stressed you out in the last two paragraphs, it was by design. But I want to take a second to explain myself. Everything I said above, it matters. It's how you cook a good salmon, but the amount of fear I created in your system: Make sure to keep the oil low, be patient, cook perfectly, that fear is USELESS. Even if you get EVERYTHING wrong, the worst case is you get a piece of salmon that's a little overcooked, a little less crispy or a little too fishy. I didn't get here with my food by being afraid of ANY of that. Nobody taught me how to cook salmon, and I've eaten my share of salmon so pink it was practically still alive, and I've eaten my share of salmon so white it'd turn into ashes if I left it in the oven any longer. And I don't regret it. 

The entire point of this was to remind you that cooking ISN'T supposed to be stressful or perfectionist. The point of a good dish is the soul you put into it, not the result that comes out of it, and trust me when I say the bad pieces of salmon taste good too, because you made it. Because you tried. 

And I get the feeling there's a life lesson in there somewhere too.

Wait...what were we talking about?

Salmon...right. Just in case you mess the salmon up, I'm going to help you make a sauce so good that you still lick the plate clean. What we're going to make is my take on a beurre blanc that's a bit more sweet and nutty as opposed to sour and savoury. Step 1 is to heat up a bit of milk to a lukewarm temperature, that's important, and I added a touch of honey into the milk, but don't overdo it. You want a LIGHT sweetness. 

A beurre blanc is basically a hollandaise sauce without the egg, and effectively the main thing you need to remember is that butter and water don't like to mix, so you have to emulsify the two together, which is a complicated way of saying that you need to add one into the other SLOWLY while mixing QUICKLY. 

Anyway, back to the process. What you want to do is take your salmon off the heat and rest it, and reuse the same pan for your sauce. Hopefully there isn't any (or much) oil left, but if there is then get rid of a bit of it. Here, we toss in some shallots, cut into thin long slices, and we leave it to cook slowly with a good crackle of salt. Your crushed/whole garlic clove from earlier can also be minced up and added alongside. Once the onion's gone transparent, what you want to do is add a bit of chicken stock, to deglaze. Literally enough for the stock to combine with all the salmon residue and fat left in the pan and the onions and garlic and get thick. IF you added too much stock, don't worry, just reduce it a bit by leaving it on the heat till it gets thick and syrupy. I personally did exactly that and the sauce was immaculate. NOW, your milk goes in, and mix mix mix. FYI, you're not using a crazy amount of milk. The quantity of milk added should be just less than the amount of chicken stock reduction in the pan, so you literally want to add ~2-4 tablespoons depending on how much reduction you've made. Stir till it's combined and the whole thing is starting to bubble again.

Here's where it gets interesting. Take your butter out of the fridge. This sauce uses a LOT of butter, like 3 tablespoons for 1 person's worth of salmon, so be ready. Cut your fridge cold butter into 2 pieces per tablespoon (they should be pretty big cubes by this point) and toss half of it straight into the pan. Remember how I said emulsions are slow processes? Well since the butter's solid and cold, it SLOWLY melts into the sauce, so if you stir quickly, you're going to make an emulsion. Once the first half of the butter's emulsified, let it keep going for a sec. Keep stirring, it'll get a light nutty brown, that's when you're done. Take the sauce off the stove and add the other half. Stir stir stir and you're ready to plate

And that's the dish. If you're curious about those green swirls, that's a green dressing oil, which is a superbly simple recipe. It needs 3 greens and oil. That's it. If you have any nice leafy greens, things like Arugula, Spinach, Chard, etc. That'll be your main green aspect. Pick up 2 more aromatic greens (chives, dill, thyme, parsley, whatever), and those will be your flavour compounds. Take your main leafy green and blanche it (Put it in a pot with boiling water for 30s, then run it under cold water or drop it into ice water). Drop your blanched leafy green with your two (or more) aromatics into the blender, cover the entire thing with oil, and blend. Pass the entire mixture through a fine mesh strainer, and you get a beautiful dressing oil. Then, swirl away!

Anyway, this time I'm not giving you guys a recipe, mostly because I think that these types of dishes are beautiful to try making on your own. Anyway, I've given you the name of a similar sauce if you do actually want a beurre blanc recipe to compare with, so you can ALWAYS find a recipe for reference, here's one I read a while back: 
https://www.billyparisi.com/beurre-blanc-sauce-recipe/#recipe

And yeah! Go for it, write a little comment or send me a text or a dm if you want help on this dish. I'd be happy to tell you how to go about it.