- [Chef Kenneth Temple] Cooking fish can be one of those challenging things for somebody to do
perfect the first time. So that's why I created this recipe for the plank salmon. The plank is
going to yield a beautiful hickory smoke. It's going to keep your fish from sticking and drying
out, and then putting this delicious Creole sauce on the top is just going to tie it all together.
Let's hook up this beautiful, charred Creole tomato... ...sauce, that is. So we're
going to take some beautiful vine-ripe tomatoes. Our Creole tomatoes are almost ready in season.
They're like twice the size of one tomato. If you could get your hands on some of them,
Creole tomatoes, hook it up. Then we're gonna throw in some celery. Then we're going to throw
in some whole onion that we sliced in half, and some bell pepper. Now, what do we get here? We get
the Trinity as Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, for y'all who're not Catholic from Louisiana.
This is Creole cooking at its finest, okay? Now we also got the love child, garlic, that we also
gonna throw in there, too. All right? Nobody ever really counts garlic a part of the family,
but garlic is all a part of the family. You know, it's the one family member everybody loves, but
always can't mention their name off their hand. That's what garlic is. So, we got all of that.
We put a little bit of oil in it and I know we're going to get our toss on, I know. Some of y'all
out there are going to think, "Why is he touching his food with his bare hands?" I gotcha, I gotcha.
Now let's just toss to evenly coat and make sure all the vegetables feel the same oil bath that
we want it. This is going to keep any of these vegetables from sticking on the grill. Look at
that: nice and shiny. That's all you're looking for. Nice and shiny. Let's pop it on the grill.
There's a thousand ways we can make a Creole sauce, but I thought it'd just be really sexy,
while the grill is going, to char some tomatoes, char the rest of the vegetables, stick that in a
blender and let it twirl around. Especially down here, when it's Creole tomato season,
you wanna eat that as many times as possible because it's only a short season that you can
enjoy this delicious treat. Even got the sign of Zorro or somebody on there. Look at that,
there. I don't know who signed that. It is nice and beautiful.
So, you're just trying to get a nice char on it. You're not trying to blacken
the vegetables, all right? But you're definitely trying to get some beautiful color
on top. Nice and seared, charred. Looking all lovely. Mm. That's what you want.
So, we're going to just chop this and have just to make it all quartered, just to make it easier
for the blender. Drop it in there. All of it in there. And then we got half of a bell pepper,
and just quarter it just to make it easy on the machine. You already got it easy,
'cause you don't have to chop all this by hand, all right? Then we got the celery - just going
to cut this into a little bit smaller pieces just to make it easy on the machine, all right?
We're going to also toss in our garlic. Full cloves. Look at how roasted and charred. And
all this is going to do is bring out the sweetness of the garlic to go with the nice
roasted flavors to complement that bitter flavor that we give it to balance everything all out.
Then we got some tomatoes. Oh yeah. Look at that. Oh. Oh, yeah, that's just beautiful,
that's just beautiful. Get y'all some of them Creole tomatoes. I'm telling you:
find your friend, with all the social media they got, to send you some Creole tomatoes, all right?
And then we just going to slice this, put that in.
Now talking about Cajun grill, that's called lagniappe, all right? You got two more tomatoes.
You can do the whole thing, but you set this to the side. We call that lagniappe, all right?
So now to it we're going to add some salt. If you're above the Mason-Dixon line,
you want to use half of this cayenne that you see up in here, all right? And some dried thyme.
Now we're just going to blitz it. You can do chunky. You can do smooth.
Whatever your preference is for tomato sauce.
You can easily call this sauce a charred Cajun sauce, right, by just serving it chunkier
than smooth. I prefer my sauce to be a little bit smoother, which is the refinement I learned
from my Creole side. But I also know that my Cajun friends would be like you're pureeing it too much,
boy! And you know, they like to serve it a little bit chunkier. So that will be the real difference
between Cajun and Creole is the refinement of the dish. My Cajun brothers just want to
hook it up and cut it however they need to, while my Creole guys would be like, hold on,
hold on, sir. It needs to be fine-chopped and diced, and then you can put it in there. My
Cajun brother would be like, man, chop that thing, put it in there, put some seasoning
on it. We gonna eat good. So, that is really the difference. Both cultures have the onion, celery,
bell pepper, and trinity. And they also both use tomato sauce and tomatoes in their dishes.
Now we've got the charred salsa done. Now let's take care of the star of the show, our salmon. So,
what we did was we took some planks and we actually soaked them for two hours so they
can absorb all of that moisture. So, we don't have blackened plank salmon, okay? We want the plank
to give off this beautiful aroma and not burn all the way, so that this acts as a wonderful base to
our fish. So, what we're gonna do is we're going to flip them all over and we're just going to rub
down the skin with a little bit of oil, just so it doesn't stick. You can use any fish that you love.
There's no rules to what you can use this recipe for, okay? And just rub them down. Give it a nice
Thai massage. Like I go to my girls around the corner from my house when I have a long workout
and you gave me a good rubdown, okay? So now we're just going to evenly
season our fish. You always want to season high. You never want to season all up on the
fish. You wanna give the fish some respect and some space. So this seasoning, it could just
fall, all right? And just let it rain, let it rain. All of that beautiful seasoning, okay?
There's no need to panic. Just take your time. All right. All of that seasoning. Mm, mm, mm.
When it comes to using planks for my seafood, I love to go with cedar because it's nice and mild
and a gentle smoke, and hickory because it's what I'm accustomed to. When I know something's been
smoked, I know I want to taste the hickory. So now we're going to place our planks on the grills.
The grill is heated to 400 degrees. We're going to cover it and let it cook for three minutes and let
it do work. You know, the benefits of using the plank is not only will it look great at the end
of the presentation, but it's definitely going to make you feel more comfortable about cooking fish
on the grill. It's going to reduce stickage, and it's also going to keep the heat from licking that
fish and burning it to a crisp. Because, let's face it, nobody likes eating dried-out fish. So,
that plank is going to add flavor, it's going to do heat protection, and it's going to give
you a presentation, all in one. Whew, you should smell that plank and that fish doing work, son.
So, now what we're going to do is, we're going to take our charred salsa
and we're just going to go ahead on and pour like three good tablespoons on it, right? And then you
just want to just kind of, you know, just spread it around a little. Just a little bit, alright?
Don't be shy with it. Have fun, you got plenty to go. Mm-hmm,
I feel ya. So, you want to make sure that you soak your planks because this is going to allow
it to really absorb all of that moisture that's necessary for the six minutes, as it's going to
cook over a direct heat. If you skip this step, you're going to burn down the plank and the fish,
and you're going to have to go to the grocery store to make groceries again.
And you can see that, as we pulled it off, it caught some flames, but that's
fine because it was at the end. If you missed the soaking for two hours,
you would have had that at minute one. Mm, mm, mm. Do you see this deliciousness? All we have to do
now is garnish it with some chives. If you're not as fancy as me, you can use green onions,
all right? But that's it, just a little bit of chive action. Everybody's happy. That's
the thing about this Creole sauce: it's perfect on anything. And if you don't even like fish,
it will work perfect on chicken or work perfect on steak. It'll work perfect just over some roasted
vegetables. This sauce alone is a star, but this dish together is a magnificent piece of art.
Oh yeah. Nice and flaky. Mm! That charred tomato sauce. Nice, spicy.
Cuts right through that richness of the salmon, so it balances the dish out, nice and perfect.
And like I said earlier, if you can't handle all the heat, just add a little
bit of cayenne. And if you want a little bit more, you can always add a little bit later.