Saucy
The other night I had some fish in danger of going south if I didn’t prepare it soon, so I cracked open the Julia Child Cookbook (circa 1964. Seriously.) and looked up some fish poaching recipes.
I modified a recipe for white wine poached white fish where the fish could be trout, or whatever. I happened to have tilapia on hand.
The recipe called for a white sauce made with the poaching liquid, once the fish had been cooked.
This was a new thing for me. I’ve made white sauces with milk dozens of times…but I hadn’t tried it with wine.
The sauce starts like you might expect, with a roux made from butter and flour. You want roughly equal amounts of each – around a tablespoon per.
To make a roux, melt butter over medium heat, then whisk in the flour. Cook this for about a minute, it will start to turn slightly brown and smell nutty.
To this, I added the poaching liquid, which was 1 cup of wine and just short of a cup of water (plus all the fishy goodness).
The hot liquid from poaching, and the hot roux come together really well. In the future, I’ll warm up my liquids before making sauce. It really helps.
I whisked together the liquid and roux and let it come to a simmer.
While the sauce was simmering I separated an egg and beat the yolk with one cup of milk in a small bowl.
Slowly, using my whisk, I dribbled a little bit of the simmering sauce into the milk/egg mixture and stirred it up. I repeated this until the milk/egg mixture was nearly as warm as the sauce (using the very scientific finger test).
This process is called “tempering” which basically warms the egg yolk up slowly so it cooks, but doesn’t become solid.
Once the milk and egg were tempered, I mixed it all back into the sauce and whisked it gently smooth.
A little salt, pepper, and red pepper flake and I had a velvety smooth delicious sauce which was surprisingly light.
Next week I’ll be trying the same technique with poached salmon. If it goes well, pictures and recipes will follow.