I admit that I don't eat or cook seafood as much as I should. Maybe it's because good quality seafood is hard to find and expensive, but mostly, I think, mostly it's because I didn't it at much as a kid. Old habits die a hard death and all. My childhood concept of seafood was limited to deep-fried fillets of shark and oven-baked, frozen Birds Eye. As an adult I have a very low tolerance for deep-fried foodstuffs, aside from good frites, and no stomach at all for cheap frozen crap, so those two 'delights' have largely been removed from my diet. Too, cooking fish is hard. Most meats are forgiving. Most seafoods are not. My failures as a cook become blindingly fucking obvious when you hand me a whole fish and tell me to cook it perfectly. Cooking through Larousse Gastronomique will see me cook a lot more seafood. Hopefully I'll learn how to do it well.
Court-bouillon is a classic way to prepare seafood. You prepare a flavoured cooking liquid in which to poach the fish. Until I read the 'court-bouillon' entry, I was under the impression court-bouillon always involved wine. Not so. You can make a simple court-bouillon with salt and water.
Tonight I'm making the wine variant. Larousse Gastronomique sets out the following formula: for every two and a half litres of water, add half a litre of dry wine wine, fifty grams each of grated onion and carrot, a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, salt and, if you like, a small amount of celery and/or parsley. Pepper is only to be added during the final few moments of cooking. I didn't add parsley today but I did add celery. The recipe discourages the use of parsley because it can easily dominate the other flavours.
Interestingly, court-bouillon is something you can hang onto and use again and again, so long as you strain and store it carefully. I wouldn't want to keep it for more than a couple of days, though.
I'm cooking a fillet of gemfish, large enough to feed two people, in the court-bouillon. Having never worked with court-bouillon before, I turned to Google for assistance. Supposedly a large fillet like the one I bought will take maybe 15 minutes to cook through. We'll see.
Now that I've actually eaten the fish, I really like--really--this way of cooking. I think I'll come back to it a lot in the near future, given we're heading into summer. This method, too, is fairly forgiving--or at least more forgiving than a frying pan.
22. Pilaf rice
I remember buying a rice cooker and using it maybe two or three times. I found the resulting rice was inferior to the rice I steamed in a saucepan on the stovetop. That's how I usually prepare rice if I'm serving it as a side dish.
The method for pilaf rice is foreign to me. You start by frying some diced onion and toasting the unwashed grains of rice in butter, which isn't so unusual--reminds me of making risotto--and work with a 1.5:1 liquid:rice ratio but then, rather than cooking on the stove top, you place the saucepan in the oven for 16-18 minutes. You then let it stand for 15 minutes. As I write this, a couple of hours before I cook, I'm a bit worried the rice will be fucking wallpaper paste after 30-35 minutes of cooking and resting. Normally, I cook and rest rice for 20-25 minutes.
I regret doubting Larousse Gastronomique for a second. This recipe produced beautiful aromatic, buttery rice. The texture is slightly different to steamed rice, probably due to the frying of the grains.
23. Carrot salad with orange
I chose this salad because it was both simple and interesting. The salad is nought but a mixture of diced orange, grated carrot and sliced onion (I went for red onions as their raw flavour is less offensive than the flavour of brown onions). Larousse Gastronomique suggests using a lemon vinaigrette but, not having any lemons on hand and not fancying a 40 minute round trip in the heat to go get some, I'll just be making a standard vinaigrette.
I liked the salad but there were two flaws, as I saw it. Firstly, the salad was dominated by orange. Not so much in terms of flavour--my choosing of navel orange was a considered decsion--but in terms of quantity. I should've bought another carrot. Maybe two. Secondly, I think the orange pieces were too big. I was nervous about cutting into the orange segments as I envisioned the juice squirting everywhere, leaving me with a salad of carrot and onion and orange pulp.
24. Basic vinaigrette
Curiously, the formula provided in this recipe differs significantly from the other one I worked with. Here Larousse calls for an acid:fat ratio of 1:3 and mentions, too, that you can add a little bit of mustard if you like. I followed the acid:fat ratio and found the taste much more pleasant than that of the vinaigrette I made the other week. I added some salt, pepper and the tiniest amount of hot English mustard--not so much you can taste the mustard, even, but enough to give it a little bit of bite.
No comments:
Post a Comment