Maine · Soup
Downeast Haddock Chowder
- Easy
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 700g haddock fillet, in large pieces
- 115g salt pork or bacon, diced
- 1 large onion, diced
- 600g potatoes, in 2cm cubes
- 500ml water or fish stock
- 500ml whole milk
- 250ml heavy cream
- 2 tbsp butter
- Salt, pepper, and a pinch of thyme
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
Allergen screen
Found: dairy · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the salt pork in the pot until crisp; lift out the bits and reserve.
- Sweat the onion in the fat until translucent, then add potatoes and the water. Simmer 12 min until nearly tender. 12 min
- Lay the haddock on top, cover, and poach gently 6-8 min until it flakes. 8 min
- Add the milk and cream and heat through without boiling. Season and finish with butter.
- Let the pot sit an hour off the heat, then rewarm gently to serve, scattered with the pork bits.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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