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04/16/08 |
                
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茶煙サーモン (Tea-smoked salmon with umeshu beurre blanc) Yields 4 lovely portions
4 ea. 6 oz. salmon fillets 2 c. alder wood chips 2 T. sake 1 t. green tea leaves 1 t. oolong tea leaves 4 ea. mint stems 2 c. umeshu 1 c. heavy cream 1/2 lb. sweet cream butter, cut into small cubes 1 in. finger of galangal, grated on an oroshi-gane 8 ea. umeboshi, pitted salt and white pepper
Toss alder chips in sake, place in smoker and top with tea and mint. Turn smoker on and prepare sauce. In a saucepan over medium heat, combine umeshu and galangal. Simmer and reduce until pan is almost dry (about 90%). Add cream and reduce by about one-third. Strain out galangal (you might need to bust out the cheesecloth), return sauce to a bare simmer. Immediately remove from heat (but leave the burner on) and whisk in butter one cube at a time, making sure the first cube is pretty much melted before adding the next. If the sauce becomes cool to the touch (which it shouldn't), put it back on the burner for a few seconds. Set sauce in a warm-ish area and go smoke your salmon to your preferred doneness (if you've got fresh salmon, shoot for medium-rare). To serve, ladle about two ounces of sauce over each salmon fillet and garnish with two umeboshi. Pair with your favourite fishy accompaniments, whatever they might be.
Note from GG: Smoked fish is awesome, especially when you can add cool flavours like tea and mint to it. Obviously, these aren't going to be prominent in the final product (it'll be mostly just smoky) but more like the background notes you find in wine. That's cool, though because then when you serve this to your guests they'll say things like, "Well, isn't THIS interesting!" and you can beam appropriately. For those of you unfamiliar with galangal, it's a cousin to ginger and is sometimes called Thai ginger or sand ginger. The flavour is quite a bit spicier, however, and not as fruity as ginger. Again, that's cool. The umeshu (Japanese plum wine) has more than enough sweetness and fruitiness to go around, so we're just looking for a complementary flavour. And when you're shopping for umeshu, please try to find the real goods (like from Choya) and stay away from stuff labeled "plum-flavoured wine." That's crap. Double bonus is that you can eat the plums that you find in the bottom of the Choya bottles. And lastly, if you don't know what an oroshi-gane is, it's one of those neat things you use to grate ginger or wasabi root. You can find them all over the place at your local Asian market. If you're too Continental for that, feel free to use a microplane, but be careful. Galangal is HARD.
This site was last updated 12/20/06 |
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