Fish Pie with Sand and Sea Foam Topping (and Fish Stock)

(Warning: long recipe, thus long post!)

So I am recounting my Winter Feast adventures. We had:

·     Pumpkin soup

·     Fish pie with Sand and Sea topping

·     Lardy cake

The main, Heston's Fish Pie with Sand and Sea topping, requires a number of elements and was probably the most challenging Heston Blumenthal dish I've made to date. This will be a long post, you may want to get a cuppa.

To start, it requires fish stock, so I'll discuss that first then move onto the main event. I'll note at the outset I don't usually cook much fish beyond salmon or seafood, so the whole experience was kind of educational.

Fish Stock

This was an annoying dish to make, and not due to Heston, but due to an inconsistent fishmonger who I ordered everything through, but then neglected to tell me they didn't have it all in when I called prior and then was put out when I didn't want to take half the ingredients one day, then come back the next day for the rest, and then again for the stuff needed on the actual day of the party. Apparently I'm odd for not wanting smelly fish heads and bones in my fridge overnight.

Okay, so let's assume you have a lovely and reputable fishmonger, and get on with it.

Chop up your fish bones. (And heads, in my case). This was kind of awkward to do. Heston states you should also remove the gills if you are using heads as they can make it bitter. So, if you are using heads go Google how to remove gills. Be a little weirded out, but manage their removal anyway. I was given snapper "frames". (Frames? I suppose its a better euphemism/term than 'carcass'...)

 

Soak them in water (presumably to get any remaining gunk off). Mmm.. Fish juice.

Prep the long list of vegetables, finely slice.

Rinsed, clean fishy-parts.

 

Slowly cook all the veggies for twenty minutes.

While that's happening fry your fish bits in a pan. This was a bit .. unpleasant. I don't know why it bothered than doing the same with chicken wings, but it did. Maybe it was the eyes looking at me that did it...

 

Okay, so then the booze, I mean wine and vermouth goes in the veggies to get boiled off. (Incidentally, I found out that Cinzano was vermouth. I did not know this. I stuck a sticky note on the bottle so I remembered for next time.)

Then in goes the fish bones and water. (I didn't stage this photo to look like Jaws deliberately, honest!)

 

Then usual cook, then turn it off and let it cool. Prep your herbs and lemon zest.

 

Optional : During this interval, you may go to your fishmonger to pick up your ordered 500g of mussels. (This will be your third visit due to the mussels not being in yesterday). Then find out they only sell it in 1 kg bags. And they refuse to sell you half a bag - despite ordering 500g and you being in yesterday to pick up the other stuff for the stock. Go home without in a very cross mood, being so pressed for time - people coming over tonight - that you decide to skip the mussels. Have a wonderful husband you listens calmly to your plight and volunteers to drive out to a different fish place after sourcing the required mussels so that you can get on with the other bits of dinner. Hurrah.

Take the lid off the now-cooled pressure cooker, and heat it up again. Add in your mussels, herbs and lemon zest and cook until the mussels are done.

Strain the liquid through muslin layers in a colander, then refrigerate for later.

 

Thoughts:

It was moderately seafood-fishy in flavour and scent. In fact, if I hadn't made it, I would have expected it had more than just two kinds of seafood in it - load of flavour. Certainly better than the basic fish stock I have purchased in the past. I don't think I was as wowed by this as the chicken stock, but that may be personal preference at work.

The colour comes from rather a lot (1/4 teaspoon) of saffron. Or at least it seemed a lot to me. I could certainly taste the saffron (I'd consider maybe a bit less next time). That said measuring 1/4 teaspoon of saffron was interesting, because its strands, it doesn't exactly sit nicely on the spoon to be measured, so maybe it is a 'difficult to measure accurately in small proportions' thing?

It also was more gelatinous than I expected from fish stock. But not in a bad way.

Fish Pie with Sand and Sea Topping

What a mammoth undertaking.

Here is a summary of the steps:

Beforehand:

1. Make the stock. (Done!)
2. Cure the salmon
3. Make confit onions
4. Make the sauce
5. Make the sand
6. Prep sea foam
7. Make Pommes Purees (potato topping)

After:

8. Mix together ingredient
9. Put on topping, grill
10. Put on sea foam and sand

Yeah. There’s a lot going on. I did some steps out of order for reasons of ease of prep and which would keep best during the day. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Cure the salmon

Get up early and get the salmon going, because it needs most of the day to cure. So I bought skin on salmon, only to realise of course, I needed it without skin. This is the result, it all came off but not quite as elegantly as I might have liked. Oh well, it’s going in a pie, no one will see it anyway. (And realistically, no one is likely to complain about the non-perfectly smooth salmon pieces, are they?)

 

Then its into its salt & sugar blankie and into the fridge. Curing salmon always feels like magic. You barely do anything, but it comes out so altered. In a good way. Maybe it’s the salmon equivalent of a yoga retreat. (I’ve never been on one, but that’s what I imagine anyway).

 

Get ready for the rest of the day. A highly necessary step, in my opinion. 

 

Prep Sea Foam Liquid

This is a clear liquid that you will foam up just before serving, containing rather a lot of ingredients .

One of these, it turns out is unavailable (locally at least). Konbu, my not-very-local specialist Japanese supermarket person tells me, isn’t able to be imported anymore. Because of the nuclear reactor fall out. Oh. (blink) Fair enough then.  

She did sell me some dashi stock powder sachets though. However, on getting it home, I realised it had a bunch of other stuff in it. I decided not to use it, mostly because I was concerned that all that extra enhancers/sugar etc might stop it foaming, and I wasn’t going to risk it. (I’ve since used it in making extra tasty sukiyaki though!)

 

So we melt some (lots) of butter and cook shallots and garlic. 

 

Then add more of the vermouth and wine from the stock making, and reduce it right down. 

 

Then add in fish stock, water and parsley. I also skipped the shiitake mushrooms as I was kind of unsure if the recipe called for fresh or dried kind, and decided to skip them. In hindsight, given the other ingredients, I suspect it was the dried kind. Heat it up, let it cook monitoring the temp annoyingly for the half hour. (Erg. Micromanagement of temperature is not my favourite thing. But then I was in the kitchen anyway…) 

 

Once that’s done, it’s strained through muslin (and then throw your muslin in with the others from the stock in the bucket with water and napisan in the laundry. Do this, it kept my laundry from smelling like fish and meant I could deal with it later). The liquid is put aside for later finishing and serving.

 

Confit onions

Okay so while the sea foam is reducing, you can get the onions doing their thing. Some multitasking is really pretty much required with this dish. Confiting the onions means covering them in oil and then cooking until they are done. The oil isn’t hot enough to be fry the onions and the oil cooks right through. It’s a very different texture. Despite this, they don’t seem particularly oily once draining. 

Nice golden onions. Yum. 

Cut them in half once they are cool and stick them aside for later.

Make some sand

The “sand” is deep fried panko.

You just heat up an awful lot of oil and then fill it full of panko. Panko are Japanese breadcrumbs – they are much light and coarser than usual breadcrumbs, with and very satisfying crunch. Cooking... getting browner....

In the recipe photo, it looks quite dark brown – too dark to look like sand to me, so I went for more of a golden colour. Drained, they looked pretty good, and tasted nice and crunchy.

Sauce making

So you cook onions and garlic in butter.

 Add in the vermouth and white wine to deglaze, then boil to reduce it down.

 

(Excuse the steam)

Then in with that fish stock, milk, cream and smoked fish (recipe calls for haddock, I had to use cod since that was the closest I could get here).

 Simmer, simmer. It smelled great. 

Off the heat and let it infuse.    

Then straining away all that stuff to get the little bit of sauce. 

Hmm. At this point I made an executive decision, and decided not to thicken the sauce with agar agar as stated. Really, I thought the sauce was just the right consistency, and I didn’t want to mess with it, as there really wasn’t that great a quantity of it. So I didn’t add the agar-agar, or blitz it or put it through a sieve. I just put it in a cereal bowl for later. It just didn't feel like much sauce.

Finish prepping the cured salmon

Okay, the salmon is finished curing. You can see how wet the salt and sugar mix is, having drawn out all that from the fish.

This is washed, dried and chopped into nice chunks to go in the pie. Fabulous texture.

 So we’re prepared for the assembly-and-heat stage ready for serving.

Pommes Puree

This is a whole own recipe of Heston’s in it’s own right, with extras added. Frankly, this is the bit I did least well of the dish – I didn’t cook the potatoes enough, and so the resulting puree was a bit more granular than I’d like, rather than silky as it should have been.

Heston notes you can pre-cook the potatoes earlier, and then just heat them up when required. I did this, and I’m not convinced this was the best idea. I had to heat the potatoes up again to get them through the potato press (Thanks to fellow foodie who let me know this, while I struggled with it). 

Possibly, this was just because they weren’t falling-apart enough, but not entirely. 

If doing this again, I’d do the potatoes when I needed them. The potatoes are twice cooked, with rinsing off in between to remove excess starch, then cooked again to falling apart. I think this second cooking is where I didn’t cook them enough. They weren’t uncooked or anything, just not super soft.

Then its pressed into loads of melted butter, and milk, with horseradish sauce, seeded mustard and Worcestershire sauce mixed in to make the mashed potato flavoured pommes puree.

(I did mix it more than this, but forgot to take a photo. )

Mix up the pie

So the various pie ingredients (smoked fish, prawns, peas, those confit onions, the cured salmon, herbs, etc. ) are mixed together, heated up, and cooked slightly.

 

Then placed in your fabulous new anniversary present pie dish. (Or you know, the pie dish you use at your house.) 

Cover with potato, make an attempt at wave shapes (and try not to be disappointed at how little they look like waves, despite kind encouragement at cheerful onlookers) and pop it under the grill while you cheer yourself up by making foam.

Prep your sea foam

So you reheat the liquid you made earlier, and add in the soya lecithin. (Word to the wise: don’t mispronounce it at the health food store when you go to buy it, or they may treat you too like an idiot and look at you blankly before saying “Oh you mean soya Lecithin.”) Look at dubiously, uncertain how this is going to become foam like without one of those whipping cream air-filled things you used to see in second hand stores before they all got bought up by food bloggers/hipsters.

Then aerate it with a hand blender and get giggly at how fun that was and how well it worked. Ignore the bemusement of your guests. (Sometimes an open plan kitchen-dining isn't a good thing.)

Assemble

Put panko sand on half with a generous quantity of foam down the gap. Serve it at the table, so everyone can ooh and ahhh appreciatively.  (The potato waves did look better in person, though nothing like the beautiful ones in the photo.)

Lessons learned:

• ‘Falling apart’ potatoes means exactly that.
• Don’t do fish pie as well as other complicated entrée and mains. It’s a lot of messing about.

Guest opinions:

This was very well received. The sea and sand topping really did add to the dish (though I ended up serving extra foam on plates, because everyone wanted some, and it was hard to serve a mix of toppings equally). Pretty much everyone opted for seconds.

An interesting observation, and not without merit, is that it is like a really amazing reconstruction of fish and chips – complete with pickled-onion substitute, crunchy fried texture and potato. And it does have those elements, though I can say with certainty this was better than any fish and chip dinner I’ve had. A very popular dish.

Verdict:

This was a great dish, with a lot of great flavours, contrasting texture - a wonderful dish. It was also a crazy amount of things going on, lots of little individual elements to prepare and keep track of. I’d consider making it again, but only with very simple entrée/dessert pairs, the three dishes I chose to make really wiped out the best of two and a half days to prepare. It is also kind of pricey with all the elements added in.

That said, a great dish. I’d say on par, if not slightly ahead of the chicken with sherry dish I made previously. And I think the best course of the night. (Though some of the guests might have liked the pumpkin soup better. It would be close.)

Next post: Lardy cake. Or "lahdidah cake" as my daughter called it.

Winter Feast : Heston’s (really good) pumpkin soup

A winter’s night feast!

New dinner party time – with three whole Heston recipes! And yes, in hindsight I probably did take on too much, but I knew it was a dinner for very forgiving friends – you know the kind – they happily try out stuff you made and accept the failures and cheer the triumphs as part of the journey.

This dinner, coming in the middle of winter was an excellent time to try out dishes best suited to a cold night. So we had:

• Pumpkin soup
• Fish pie with Sand and Sea topping
• Lardy cake

 

Soup: Pumpkin Soup

(from Heston Blumenthal at Home)

I love a relatively low effort dish. I say relatively, because this one can scale in complexity, depending on how many of the “optional” components you add. But even if you do all the extras, the effort is still very manageable. And tasty. Did I mention tasty?

So this has the following steps:

1. Prep your pumpkin.
2. Roast half the pumpkin, pan cook the other half with onion
3. Make rosemary flavoured milk
4. Add the items from 1-3 plus water and cook in a pan.
5. Puree it.
6. Make your extras.
7. Prep your plates, and serve.

 So yes, there are seven steps, but really there’s nothing super complicated about this.

I did everything up to the making of the extras (and some of them) the day before because I was making fish pie on the day of the party, and as you’ll see in my next post, that was a seriously crazy amount of work.

Prep your pumpkin

Take your lovely pumpkin. (I only needed half a pumpkin to get the 850g of flesh required).

 

Use a mandolin to slice half thinly, and chop the half into fat cubes for roasting. I also used the mandolin to quickly slice up those three onions, since it was out anyway.

Cook your pumpkin

The cubes of pumpkin go in the oven while you melt a staggering amount of butter. Well, it is Heston after all. 

 

Add in your thin sheets of pumpkin and onion and get them going. Or get bored waiting for the butter to completely melt, and put them all in anyway. 

Cook until soft and golden and smell really great.

Check out the delicious roasted pumpkin!

Make rosemary milk

Those people familiar with the process of making infused milk for ice-cream purposes will know this bit. Heat up your milk until almost simmering, take it off the heat, bung in your rosemary and then leave to infuse. You may be surprised how much flavour the milk can take on doing this.

Once it’s done infusing, strain out the rosemary, leaving savoury-smelling milk. Interesting. (I’m far too used to it smelling like vanilla my brain was getting mixed feelings about that as a result).

Into the pot!

In goes all the pumpkin, onion and rosemary-scented milk. Simmer away, you.

 

Puree it

I really need to get onto a new stab blender at some point. But  it works, so never mind! Make sure it’s really smooth. You are supposed to pass through a fine sieve. I may have done this, or not. I can’t recall.

You do then get to make Jackson Pollock-inspired designs as you add in cayenne, salt, sesame oil and balsamic. Isn’t it pretty? Then puree it away. (Never mind, art can be transient, and more beautiful for it). This is done to taste. I know some found the suggested quantity of sesame oil too overpowering. I used probably half the listed sesame oil and three quarters of the balsamic. And got my super-tasting husband to check the balance.

Make your extras

In this case, four extras. Red pepper (capsicum) diamonds, roasted red pepper oil, hazelnut dust and brown butter.

Roasted capsicum (peppers)

Heston has another variant on another trick I’ve seen for roasting (or rather peeling) roasted capsicum.

Cut up your capsicum, and grill until skins are nicely blackened.

Put them (hot) into a bowl and cover with cling film. (I’d seen this done as putting them into a plastic freezer bag, but I like the bowl version better). Leave them to cool.  Once cool you can just pull off the skins pretty easily, leaving the deliciously sweet flesh. Yum.

Cut some into diamond shapes.

Red pepper (capsicum) oil

Pretty straightforward – take some roasted capsicum and lots of olive oil.

Blend it.

Strain it either with a reasonable sieve or, do what I did and very carefully strain it in stages through a tea strainer into a mug.

Ok, it worked, but was pretty fiddly and I had to be super careful not to spill any non-sieved oil into the mug.  Just a note, you need hardly any of this to serve, so make the smallest quantity that seems reasonable to you. Seriously, you need a few drops per person.

Hazelnut dirt  (Hazelnut and rosemary mixture)

Hazelnut and rosemary mixture is what Heston seems to call it, but it looks just like dirt. Or maybe fine sand. Albeit tasty dirt. Really, its just toasted hazelnuts, fresh rosemary and dry breadcrumbs whizzed into powder. I thought it would be oily somehow, but nope. (Excuse the bunnikins bowl, I started running out of grown up bowls to hold all the components for assembly there. I’ll trust you’ll forgive the lack of gravity this brings).

Brown butter

So this isn’t difficult, but does have an excellent tip from Heston for improving your brown butter.

Cook your butter until a nice nut-brown colour in a little frypan or saucepan.

Then, filter it through a coffee filter.

This worked really well! Other than being a tad messy, it produces a beautiful clear brown butter without any clumps or browned solid bits – just beautifully clear brown butter.

Prep your plates

Something that takes this dish into the above the ordinary (or “pumpkin-flavoured water” as one guest called most pumpkin soup) is the extras.

Warm up your brown butter, and using a pastry brush, surround the tops of your bowls with a thick-ish rim of butter.

Now, much like flouring a cake pan, sprinkle on your hazelnut dirt. I’ve heard from a friend she had trouble making hers stick but mine seemed to stick without a problem.

Add in some pumpkin seeds (often labelled as pepita) and some of the roasted capsicum diamonds.

Serve

Aerate the soup with your stab blender and ignore the bemusement from your guests when they ask what you are doing. Ladle in the soup carefully to the bowls and dot on some of the red capsicum oil.
(This is a seriously bad photo, sorry. It was a lovely orange colour, with dots of deep red. Photo editing couldn't fix it either.!) 

Thoughts

A successful dish. The flavour was really very good, and the combination of roasted and sautéed pumpkin plus the sesame oil and balsamic gave it a real depth of flavours going on.  The pumpkin seeds and roasted capsicum pieces also added to the dish far more than I thought they would.

You could probably skip the roasted capsicum oil, but since you want the roasted capsicum pieces, its really not much more effort. I’d certainly make this again, especially if pumpkin was in season.

Guest verdict

This was a very popular dish, especially considering it is, superficially at least, fairly standard fare. Many guests opted for second helpings, and many nice things were said. Including one convert from a non-pumpkin soup loving (the “pumpkin soup just tastes like pumpkin-flavoured water” gentleman) to being second-helping seeking happy guest. (His other half was most impressed). If that’s not endorsement, I’m not sure what it would take!

Next post: Fish pie. The most complicated Heston dish I’ve yet undertaken.


As an aside: Have you been watching Heston on Masterchef? I'm envious. How awesome would that be to cook with him?! Plus, I want to play with all their kitchen toys. Smoking gun? Yes please! Liquid nitrogen? I used to use that in a previous job, I'm totally there.