Marinated Salmon with Pickled Cucumbers Recipe

Marinated Salmon with Pickled Cucumbers Recipe Rhiannon Ally: We’re heading back to Le Caprice in New York where executive chef Michael Hartnell just has had a whip up marinated salmon with pickled cucumbers and pink grapefruit in today’s Better Bites. Michael Hartnell: Okay. So, the next dish we’re going to do is marinated salmon with pickled cucumbers and pink grapefruit but this one is obviously very healthy, very easy to do. It takes a couple of days to cure the salmon but it’s all done by itself and it’s rewarding when you get to the end. So, I have here a nice piece of what we call king salmon. It’s from Washington State. It’s wild, organic salmon. What we do with this, I’m just going to place in a tray like so. What we have here is a mixture of sugar, salt, lemon zest and ground white pepper. What we’re going to do is we just pack this over the top of the salmon, plenty of it. I’m going to pack that all nice and firm. A clean film or Glad wrap or Saran wrap the tray. Leave in your refrigerator for 48 hours. After 24 hours, you can turn it. You put it on the other side and then after 48 hours, you end up with something very much like this. As you can see it shrunk. We’ve trimmed the upper layer of it around the edges to make it nice and tidy. And what we’re going to do with that, we’re just going to take some American mustard. This is just sweet mild American mustard. Spread it on to the top of the salmon and this is going to be used as our glue if you like. We just add some chopped dill. I’m just going to sprinkle that over the top and just pack it down. You do this all over the salmon and then again, plastic wrap, nice and tight, leave it in the fridge and then you should end up with something a little bit like this. So, this is fully cured and has been wrapped with the plastic wrap in the fridge. We’re going to take some nice slices. As you see, it’s almost about the same texture as smoked salmon. Some people call it the as gravlax or gravadlax I think it’s called here but this is a very simple, very easy to do at home. To accompany the salmon, what I’m going to do is take an ordinary peeler. Just take a little bit of the skin off to make these really nice ribbons to garnish our salmon. Here I have a very small amount of pecan liqueur which is just white wine vinegar, mustard seeds and shallots. We bring that all out to the boil and strain it often then we’re left with the nice liqueur. We’re going to start to arrange the plate and you can do this up beforehand if you have a dinner party, so they’re ready to go. A couple of the bright red segments, put some of the green cucumber and that’s to give it a little color. And here, we just have a really simple emulsification of American mustard, sweet American mustard again, the same mustard that we use for the salmon and a little bit of vegetable oil, a little bit Dijon mustard and some sugar so it’s nice and sweet and very mild. I’m just going to drizzle that over the top and there we go. Rhiannon Ally: Perfect summer dish! For the Chef Hartnell’s recipe, log on to Bettertv.com and click on the Recipe tab.