Bringing the people behind our food to life. We’re going to do an Oregon Dungeness Crab salad with fennel and curry mayonnaise today. First thing we’re going to do is make the curry mayonnaise and then we’re going to do all the ingredients for the salad. So we make mayonnaise by hand, first thing you need is egg yolks, we need a little bit of acids, so here’s a little bit of lemon juice, we need a little bit of salt and pepper which helps get the mayonnaise keeps going; we’re going to put curry powder in hours, we’ll beat the spice so there’s the curry, and then we need oil. Little restaurant trick, we take one bowl, put a towel, stick it either on another bowl on a pot, it won’t move on you. And now you don’t need your little helper, you can make everything all yourself. Mix up the egg yolks, this is regular vegetable oil, we don’t want it too shrung so we don’t want to use any olive oil or anything flavored, and slowly drizzle a little bit of oil at a time while you’re mixing up the egg yolks. If you have a mixer at home, you can do this in a mixer, you start very slowly on slow speed, make sure all the oil is incorporated before you drizzle too much more in, just do it slowly and take your time; this mayonnaise certainly has to be (0:01:31.2) when you are complete. If you’re going to use it for anything else and trust me it tastes a million times better than store-bought mayonnaise. If you do not want to do this by hand or yourself, you can buy a good quality mayonnaise from the store and then just add a little bit of prepared curry powder to it and perhaps a little bit of lemon juice or a little bit of vinegar to balance out the flavors. As it keeps incorporating you can add a little bit quicker and you can increase the speed of the machine if you’re doing it by the machine. It’s going to start getting thoroughly thick and if it gets too thick on you, a little bit too thick for our purposes, all you need to do is add a little bit of cold water, thin it out a little bit, again drizzle it slowly make sure it is incorporated, and then you can go back to adding a little bit more oil.
The key once again is do this slowly and make sure everything is incorporated and then we need to taste everything at the end and make sure that it is balanced. If you need add a little bit more of lemon juice to add a little bit more acid, if it’s not spicy enough for you, you can add a little bit more curry powder and again that’ll need a little bit of salt and pepper probably at the end, make sure that everything is balanced out.
That’s all the oil that we need, we’re going to thin this out just a little bit more so it’s usable for our salad. And we’re going to grab a spoon and taste it to make sure it’s balanced. A little bit more salt, little bit more pepper; perfect, we’re going to put that to the side. Then we grab all of our ingredients for the crab salad. First thing you need is Dungeness crab, this is Oregon Dungeness crab, this is all the meat of the Dungeness crab; it’s got the back meat, the body meat and the claw meat all together. This is fresh, you can also get it frozen during the off-season, right now in winter it is fresh. If there’s any excess liquid, go ahead and drain that and you may want to pick through slightly the scissors any extra shell from when they cleaned it initially. This is all cleaned, ready to go so we add that, this is going to give us a little bit of shellfish brininess from the seafood and a little bit of sweetness, Dungeness crab is a very great, sweet quality to it when compared to other crab around the country. We need diced-up shallot, this gives us a little boldness onion component, if you don’t use shell it, use a very mild onion, if you do this in the summer, it certainly is a sweet onion. We need diced-up fennel, so you just dice up fennel right there; this gives us a little anise or black licorice component, it helps again bounce everything out and gives us something else; this is diced up European cucumber and add that to it, some more sweetness and crispness and diced up celery. All these ingredients are growing here in Oregon and perfect in the winter. The last component is we’re using all of the fennel, fennel comes with fennel top, the fronts that looked like dill, so that add a little bit more anise flavor to it, we’ve diced up the fronts and we’re going to add that to this, and the last, last piece is going to be a little bit of apple. This is a Fuji apple; Fuji has a great little balance of sweetness and tartness. You don’t want to use anything too tart because you want to balance everything. And we’ll dice up a little bit of the Fuji apple; this adds a little bit more sweetness, a little bit more acidity for us, a little bit more crunch, it’s a nice winter tree fruit. Add this component to the salad, and then the last piece all together is a little bit of lemon juice. We’re going to use the lemon zest itself for a little bit of bright lemon flavor, then we’ll use a little bit of the lemon juice to help with the acid, great. Now we take our mayonnaise, make sure it’s mixed up well and add a little bit at a time, don’t add too much because we’ve made more mayonnaise in this recipe can get call for, and then you slowly start mixing and folding it. I don’t like mixing too much because we’ll break up the crab too much. So as gently as you possibly can, while still incorporating everything just to moisten the crab meat and bring all the vegetables together. With a little bit of pepper, a little bit of salt, cause again none of these ingredients except the mayonnaise were seasoned; we need to taste it to make sure it’s well-balanced. And then finally we’re going to go ahead and plate this. You can do a very simple presentation, simply putting this in a bowl, eating it like a salad itself; you’re doing this as a first course for a dinner party or like to make something a little bit fancier. We’re going to make a real, nice, a little bit fancier presentation. Take a little bit of the dressing, put it on the plate for a little bit of time there to begin with, then I’ve got some nice sprouts; in the winter time, some bitter greens which is a nice balance to all the sweetness and acidity there will go well, this is some sprouts that grow here in the winter, we’re going to put that down right in the middle; we’ll put a little bit of a ring and then we’re going to take some of the salad, just lightly mold it, just gently pack it down, again you don’t want to mix up and break up anything too much; we’re going to take that off which should hold together nicely, and then we saved a few of the larger pieces of claw meat; we’re just going to put a few extra on top cause that’s the best part of the crab. Oregon Dungeness crab with fennel and curry mayonnaise.
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