frozenchief |
09-19-2020 12:40 PM |
I eat a lot of halibut and salmon. Salmon is fairly fatty and strongly flavored, although there are things you can do to soften the flavor. If you just eat it straight, you will get a lot of salmon flavor. If you have enough to can salmon, you can add soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic and onion or jalapeños and some smoke powder. Those ‘lessen’ the salmon flavor. If you don’t can it, I would cut salmon into bite-size portions. Sauté with onions and mushrooms and some sage. Finish with heavy cream and serve over egg noodles.
Halibut is a more meaty fish. It is pretty steak-like in its firmness. Halibut is far more of a blank canvas that shows the flavors of other parts of a dish, but halibut can dry out very easily. As a white fish, there are a myriad of ways to deal with halibut from grilling to sautéing to broiling.
My favorite is to sous vide the halibut. Add a couple sprigs of sage or tarragon, a couple slices of lemon and about 2 tablespoons of butter. Sous vide at 122 degrees for about 30-45 minutes if the steaks are less than 1” thick, about 45-60 minutes if they’re over an inch thick. Use the juice from the sous vide bag to make an integral sauce with some stock. If you don’t have stock, use canned clam juice. To make the sauce, sauté some garlic, shallots or onions with some butter. Deglaze the pan with white wine or sherry. Once the wine is cooked down to a thick syrup, add the juices and stock and reduce by about ½. Finish with some butter or some cream. Not overdone, not fishy and it just melts in your mouth.
Cod is more flaky and fatty and is more typical of fish. Light flavored, I find cod is best fried in a beer batter. You can make beer battered halibut or salmon but I like cod best. To make a good beer batter, make sure the beer is really cold and use it quickly. In other words, don’t make your batter and then let it sit for a day. You want the carbonation. I also use a beer that is heavily malted, such as Alaska Amber. IPAs and bitter, hoppy beers don’t do as well. I also season the flour for my batter. I usually use salt, pepper, ancho chili pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and then whatever I feel like.
Because of Covid, travel restrictions to rural Alaska have really put a crimp in how much salmon and halibut I have in my freezer going into the winter. When we lived in the Bush, I’d say we ate salmon about 2 nights a week and halibut about 1 night a week. I’ve cooked those fish in more ways than I can count, so if you’ve got any more questions, let me know. I’m happy to help.
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