Smoked Salmon with Blinis and Caviar

Live chef

Chef Jacques van Staden

Smoked salmon with Bellini, caviar, asparagus salad and lemon juice vinaigrette.

This is a regular side of smoked salmon what we do you buy it un-sliced now you can get it to the store un-sliced as well. And now what we do we actually cut it in little pieces. So it was just one side this slim if you have the whole fillet of the smoke salmon what we do, we trimmed it down the center and then we cut it just a crosswise. So then you come up with little pieces like this and what is very important always in the bottom when you remove the skin from the salmon there is always that brown, all fish has it it’s called it’s a blood vein. And it’s very important remove it especially from tuna some other are harder to conceive you have sword fish or we have tuna and you see the sword fish is nice and white and you have this brown piece string to it, well that is the blood vein you have to remove that.

Salmon has the exact same thing you have to remove the blood vein because it has a real bitter taste to it and you don’t want to eat them. And so what we do we trim all of this and we trim of it. You know and I’m sure just a bunch of you eat sushi, especially in sushi restaurant is they know it you have to remove it a lot of other restaurants they don’t know it. So that’s one thing you have to know say you are going to have sushi there wont be any blood veins on it, alright. So with the salmon we are going to do we are just going to sear it or we are going to wait last minute for this.

Because, this is – what is nice with this is when you sear it, it is a smoke salmon, cold smoke salmon not a hot smoke salmon but what is good with this is that little lights here is just little more hit of smokiness and just an interest and you will see today when were going to fix it. So but let us start with our blinis, I’m sure everybody is familiar blinis I kind of like to do all kinds of different blinis. We make yellow corn blinis, lobster blinis, scallion blinis there is all kind of blinis you do. You know, you usually go to a restaurant you have blinis since always buck wheat blinis or whatever.

So this one what we are going to do is sour and chive cream blinis we are going to do with lemon with it, all right. So and it’s very easy blinis is almost like pancakes were going to have a little bit flour actually that’s not little without wet ingredients first always start with your eggs and were going to have some cream and then the sour cream. This is just regular whole milk, okay you can use heavy cream if you want to again your choice. And then rail of sour cream that is what I have here. You don’t have to put sour cream I do sour cream, because sour cream in smoke salmon goes pretty well together and that why we really enjoy doing it.

So always mix all your wet ingredients first all right then what I’m going to do, I’m going to ahead with the chives in here mix that up and I have also black pepper and some of our salt that we are going to put in here. Baking powder, baking powder very important for this recipe because baking powder would actually make blinis rise if you don’t have baking powder you make a nice little flat crate. Okay so the choice is yours, you have too and just a pinch just like a tablespoon or maybe even less than a tablespoon like a quarter – three quart of a tablespoon is more than enough.

Now how do you taste this you know blinis when we make it in the restaurant is one of those things after you make a few of them same on the crepes you kind to get used to the consistency of what it should look like you know. I mean I think sure a lot of you has done some crepes or even some waffles, so you know that we actually make it, it needs a nice thick consistency for blinis and crepe obviously has a more firm on consistency. Again little tricks have you seen here you will always put a weight down underneath. So when you whisk your bowl doesn’t actually turn around, you know, you will the bowl turn around you tried to hold then put your flour it doesn’t work like that, so we put a little wet towel down and then mix it in.

Now you asked me probably should you shift it in. Yes, you can shift it in it’s not a problem but if you mix all the wet ingredients first and you just mix it fine and it is going to be a nice thick consistency you don’t have to really shift it in because there hasn’t any clumps. So I look at this and I go, oh, its fine it’s almost there but I’m going to add a little bit in flour get a little bit thick so that’s about what I’m looking for. I have smoke salmon caviar usually for the smoke salmon caviar is smoke salmon roll. You don’t really want to cook it like something is going to put it in the blinis but what we will do we put it last minute in the blinis when you flip it over.

Okay, I also have hackleback caviar this is not from extortion but it is hackleback caviar not fishy, not a choice but it is not fishy I see some faces pulling you in a card here it is not fishy; it is actually very, very good. And then we have some green asparagus, I have diced tomato, and this is something it’s called masago, actually crispy masago. You have a masago which is a Japanese caviar which they used estupido caviar you will have a lot of times in sushi restaurant trust me, do you eat sushi, you’ve had it before.

Now with this is more like a crispy it’s like a little rice cracker but what we are going to do we are going to garnish the salmon with it, it was nice, it was very into textures. I mean if you have something mushy got to have something crunchy with it and vice versa you always have to have different textures and what’s nice with masago when you put it in on a salmon you have the little crunch you will see that today.

This I have to explain to you this is what I call lemon vinaigrette, okay vinaigrette is made with an emulsification where you blend whether it’s mustard and raspberry coulee and you have vinegar with it and emulsify the oil in it that’s regular vinaigrette. Or if you have a loose vinaigrette you can always whisk it, what we do with this we take lemon juice bring it to a boil, okay we have vanilla seed in there and sugar. So its 50-50 ratio a couple of lemon juice, a couple of sugar right, so just a little bit say three quarters of a cup of sugar. So in that way you have the nice sweet and sour consistency but what you have to do with this one is you have thickened it with cornstarch.

So what you do as it boils and you have your lemon juice boiling with your little vanilla seed, if you don’t have vanilla seed no big deal you can use little bit of vanilla essence. The reason why we use it, it kind of gives it more of detection on it, you know, when you taste it, it naturalizes a little bit. Okay and it gives it a little more nutty taste, so for the cornstarch. The reason when we do the cornstarch, you know, just put a little bit of water and then you whisk it there and thicken it and then cool it down. The reason for the cornstarch if you are going to reduce the lemon juice with the sugar its going to turn brown because what actually happens it will caramelized, it wont really, it wont get to the consistency of that you will never get it to this thick consistency.

In order you want, you just want the sugar and lemon juice by itself because it’s too thin on the plate, okay. so that’s something that you got to have get it, have to get to a point where you can actually mixed the cornstarch in it and then do it. All right, this one I’m adjusting for a little oil again you don’t have to put oil but you will se something is good for a little bit of oil and I just wipe it so you can see what’s going. So it just doesn’t stick like I say this is why it’s perfect when it works with this if you have a little bit of the bengaline spray which is really, really nice for it.

So let us get his hot in the mean time we are going to take our asparagus and the tomato this is jus blanch green asparagus and I do a dice tomatoes okay and this is all this is. Blanching it, I don’t if your not familiar with the term blanching, blanching is actually when we have, you take boiling hot water and with salt in it and you put your asparagus and you cook it just the way been taken and then take it out and shock it in an ice water and that’s what blanching. That’s a lot of terms that we use in the restaurant because when we cook something a lot of times you don’t have time to cook it on a minute or right at the last minute. So what we do we blanch it ahead of time so when we actually have to cook it you just warm it up in a pan.

And that’s the same with this vegetables and you will see it later on when were going to cook vegetables for the fillet. So you’re going to mix this up all right and then were get our plate here with the smoke salmon. What I’m going to do is them same things we are just going to season it just a little bit with some black pepper and then I’m just going to do one side and I will show you -- we are going stir it. But – and then we finish our blinis here for – obviously like I said before if you are going to do your blinis in a pan it gets a little bit more challenging. And one easy thing to do too, so if you want to do it in a pan its easier to use a pan that is kind of like more flat because you don’t want to – it’s hard to get in there, you understand.

So it’s all this little things that helps, you know, when you do this to make it better. I’m going to actually do this smoke salmon in a pan since I wanted to do it on that flat pan, so it won’t work there, so I’m going to do it in the same pan right here. All right, so look at your blinis you will see it will start to rise, okay and then once its start to raise you will see there is a little bubbles – comes out into it that’s when you know it’s ready. Because a lot of people like, it will be loose, it will be easy to pick it up but to really understand this is the same thing when you make crapes. You put the crapes in the skillet and as soon as you start to see little bubbles, you know it’s ready to flip it over, okay.

So let me take the smoke salmon I’m going to do just three prices right now and what we do is we take it actually put it an a pan we just stir like this and very lightly I mean you literally choose when you see – little pieces on it, okay. Reminding you how to cook the blinis, so you can get it – and then like I said before you are just going to do it outside that’s all you are going to do, you just want to warm it up, okay. Our blinis when this one is ready and I don’t know if you can see, you can see some bubbles on here what happens with this too it was like you have two choices. If you flip it sometimes you see it is a little bit loose but once you flip it over it will fall down and it will just kind of like adhere to itself and will come up just nice, you can see it comes nice and fluffy though it will come up, okay.

So let me take this one and its very there you go tip it over see on the color on that side if you want more color that’s not a problem you can do it smoke salmon again just turn it. now this seems like a lot but like I said can go ahead do your garnish first get it out of the way and then you can go ahead and concentrate actually on doing the smoke salmon.

We call it egg moose, it was just, egg yolk everybody has made double eggs before so what you do with the egg moose you take your egg yolks put it in the – we actually put this in a blender. So we put it in the blender lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper and this is our egg moose and this is what was going to use on the smoke salmon too. On the blinis have a look here and of what you can see but when you see its starts puffing up it’s ready, okay it’s done so I will take this out, put them on a plate. This dish – whenever you make it try to conserve it to the point where it’s almost warm, you don’t want to – them serve it cold because you want to make sure the blinis is warm you want to make sure the smoke salmon is still warm as well.

And that there go the egg moose apply a little bit of egg moose on here and again this is easy like I said just take egg yolks, lemon, a little bit of olive oil put it in a blender your right salt and pepper and you are done. Okay, now the smoke salmon if you look at it, don’t worry it’s not hot my fingers are not burning here, okay. So if you look at it you just want to sear a little of the sides that’s all you were looking for here okay. And were going to take it put it right on top of our blinis and then the caviar again if you don’t like caviar you don’t have to do the caviar but it’s just it makes, it’s part of the presentation but all over with the caviar, put it on the salmon.

And when you – the contrast between the different colors is also a beautiful you can see it and you’ve got the nice orange, you got white, you got yellow and it’s really, really nice white. And then let me do the smoke salmon, the smoke salmon all of this is just garnish so if you want to emit this it’s fine but for us in the restaurant when we do this, this is all just garnish for vinaigrette like I said pour the lemon juice, okay and were going to spoon that over it. When you put the vinaigrette make sure don’t put it directly on the salmon put it on all around the salmon because you don’t want the blinis to get saggy. So that’s when we do it all around and then we are going to put our asparagus on it right in between, nice summer dish I mean if you look at it, it’s got summer I think personally I think, it was summer written all over it.

And then were going to do the crispy masago put that on top, so when you eat it, you look at it it’s got a nice texture you got the blinis, you got the soft, you got egg, and you got a little crunchiness of it. One last thing and I have explained to you that I have some Hawaiian salt here which is more – it’s got like a more little orange color or brownish color they baked in a clay Hawaii. It’s more like rock salt but they baked it clay, because of the baking in the clay that’s how it gets the color all right. So here we go this is will be half right here, we have our smoke salmon with the blinis, caviar, egg moose, asparagus salad and our lemon vinaigrette.


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