Today is January 25, meaning that it’s Burns Night and I should be having the traditional haggis with neeps and tatties and a wee dram. Too bad that I’m not a fan of minced lamb pluck with oatmeal (most of it’s pretty bad).

For his “bonne franquette” dinner, my pal Karl had served a recipe that he had pulled off CanalVie for an olive oil-poached salmon with a warm potato salad. Interesting, as it’s essentially the fish version of confit. Since I had some salmon I decided to recreate this dish but with a eye towards a controlled confit process.

Ingredients

• salmon
• olive oil
• aromatics (e.g. fresh herbs, lemon zest etc)

Preparation

The evening before, lightly salt and pepper the salmon (the intent is to draw out excess liquid as with duck but to not have enough salt to start curing the salmon. Coat the salmon with the aromatics, cover and refrigerate for up to 12 hours. Rinse off the crust and completely dry with paper towel.

Measure out adequate olive oil to fully cover the salmon into an oven-proof dish. Heat the oven to 65ºC / 150ºF. Immerse the salmon into the oil and poach at a controlled temperature for 30 minutes. Remove from oil, drain and serve.

Notes

This is essentially the oil-encased version of sous-vide for fish. Anyway, as per references, when poached or cooked sous-vide properly, the resulting fish will still have a slightly “raw” look to it but will be very soft and will not have the texture of raw fish. The belly portion of the salmon will give away that it is cooked as the fish oil will have started to melt into the flesh. The stuff in the background of the photo is a warm potato salad (steamed grelots, chopped dill, chopped green onions, bacon), but the fish can be served with pretty much anything.

Interesting technique but it’s not one where one would want to eat a lot of the oil-poached salmon because it has a richer mouthfeel which enhances the salmon’s underlying fattiness to give that “full” feeling really quickly. I have conducted this exercise a second time with a longer cooking time which resulted in flaked salmon which I felt was overcooked. I’m curious to try this with a drier fish, like halibut which may benefit from additional oil to moisten the flesh but I think doing this as a true water bath sous-vide with oil in the bag will provide the best results.

Oh – I’m cheap on the bonne franquette: this was still a technical exercise, so no wine much less Puligny-Montrachet.

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