This salmon pate is like a little black dress. It works for any occasion: from casual lunch
to a fancy dinner party. If you are new to cooking fish, this is a great place to start.
This dish will give you practice with testing fish for doneness. That’s like the most
important skill in cooking fish. But the good news is that the stakes are pretty low here.
Even if you overcook the fish, the final result will still be good. I really can’t think
of many fish dishes that I can say that about.
We’ll need to cook 1 lb of salmon for this dish. How you do it is completely up to you.
You can grill it, poach it, sear it, broil it, or bake it. So yes, this is a great dish
to make with any salmon leftovers. But since browning isn’t necessary for this dish,
I am going to bake my salmon at a fairly low temperature. The benefit of this method is
to give you a much bigger window of opportunity to catch the fish at the right level of doneness.
It also allows you to focus on doneness exclusively and not worry about coordinating doneness
with browning.
Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and put 1 Lb of salmon onto a foil lined baking dish.
The foil is to make the clean up easy, so feel free to skip it if you don’t mind washing
the pan.
Sprinkle the salmon with a little salt. Go easy here since we’ll eventually combine
this salmon with smoked salmon. And as you know smoked salmon is very salty. Drizzle
with a tiny bit of oil to prevent the top from drying up. Put the salmon in the middle
of the oven for about 15 minutes per inch of thickness in the thickest part. In all
my other fish videos, I tell you that fish cooks in about 6 to 8 minutes per inch of
thickness, but here we are using a very low temperature, so it will take longer.
At about 18 minutes, mine was done. Most students in my classes are afraid to pull the fish
completely apart and take a good look inside because they feel that they’ll ruin the
look. I think that dry fish is way worse than ugly fish in any preparation, but in this
particular case, you really don’t need to worry about the looks. We’ll be breaking
this salmon up before serving anyway, so open it up and take a good look.
Insert a fork between the flakes in the thickest part of the fish. Just make sure you aren’t
close to the edge of the fillet. If you can pull the flakes apart, the fish is done. Make
sure the inside is still orange and translucent looking, not light pink. Basically, you want
your salmon to still look raw inside, but you want your flakes to separate all the way
to the skin with gentle pulling. The internal temperature will continue to go up as the
fish rests. Put your salmon back together and let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes. Just
to clarify. The internal temperature will continue to go up only for about 5 minutes.
The rest of the resting time is to cool the fish off.
About the white gunk that oozes out of salmon and other fish. That’s albumen. It’s a
harmless protein -- the same stuff the egg white is made out of. There are lots of theories
about how to reduce it. Two main theories you’ll find on-line is salting ahead and
cooking at low heat. Salting ahead or brining does help. You’ll need at least a couple
of hours to make it effective. But I never found cooking at low heat to help with albumen.
If anything it seems to hurt because it extends the cooking duration. We cooked this salmon
at way lower heat than I usually use when searing and grilling and my grilled salmon
produces almost no albumen. But do we care about the white gunk? Not at the slightest.
We’ll mop it up and no one will ever know.
While the salmon is cooling, let’s prep the other ingredients. Zest one lemon and
squeeze enough juice to get a couple of teaspoons. Chop one medium shallot or a couple of scallions.
If neither one is available, a red onion would also work. For a shallot, start with a dice
and then mince the pieces until they are pretty small. Rinse and dry about 1 Tablespoon of
capers. Without rinsing, I find them too briny. You might find them too briny all together
and decide to skip them entirely or reduce the amount. Everyone in my family besides
me thinks that the best capers are the ones left unused.
Ok, we’ve got our minced capers. Now we’ll need some herbs. Today I have dill, parsley,
and chives. If you can find some tarragon, it’s really nice in this dish. But unfortunately,
my store was out of it. Remove the stems and mince everything up.
The last thing you want to chop is smoked salmon because it will make your board and
knife really messy. This is cold smoked salmon. In other words, it has the texture of raw
fish, not cooked fish. I am sure hot smoked salmon could work in this dish too, but it
will have a very different texture.
Now that we have all our ducks in a row, we can assemble our pate.
So far we have shallots and smoked salmon in the bowl. Let’s add the lemon zest and
juice, the capers and the herbs. The amount of herbs I showed you on the cutting board
was for a few dishes I am making today. It’s completely up to you how much to put in the
salmon pate. Now we need some binders. We’ll need 30 grams of room temperature unsalted
butter cut into a few pieces, 65g of mayo, 35g of sour of cream or creme fraiche, and
15 g of Dijon mustard. I weighed all this stuff just for you. This is the kind of dish
where I normally eyeball everything. Mash it all up with a fork. You want to really
work on that butter. Smear it against the bottom and the sides of the bowl to get it
evenly distributed. At some point, add some black pepper to this mixture.
The last thing to go in is our cooked salmon. The reason we are adding it last is to avoid
mushing it too much. While it was resting, it finished cooking and got almost opaque,
but not dry. It will come off the skin very easily. If you see any of that white gunk,
gently peel it off. I prefer to leave the brown flesh behind because it tastes a bit
fishy, but it won’t hurt anyone, so if you want, feel free to use it.
Mix it all up very thoroughly, breaking up the salmon into little flakes.
Taste and add more salt and lemon juice as necessary. Mine needed a little salt. Although
this is very good served immediately, I think it tastes even better if you chill it in the
fridge for at least 4 hours or overnight. This will give it a chance to firm up a bit.
If you want to go completely casual, serve it in a sandwich for lunch like a tuna salad.
For a slightly fancier version, you can serve it on slices of baguette or little toasts
as an appetizer, and if you want to go all out, stuff it into cream puffs for fancy little
hors d'oeuvres. Oh, and did I mention that it makes a good filling for crepes? I told
you, it’s like a little black dress.
Here are more culinary tutorials for you to check out and a link to my online classes
is in the description below.