Lyon & Burgundy · Main
La Pochouse Verdunoise
- Advanced
- 55 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg mixed river fish: pike, perch, tench and a piece of eel, cleaned and cut into thick sections
- 750 ml Bourgogne Aligoté
- 150 g smoked lardons
- 16 small onions, peeled
- 250 g button mushrooms
- 50 g butter, for the pan
- 40 g softened butter, for the beurre manié
- 40 g plain flour
- 1 onion, sliced
- 3 garlic cloves, crushed
- bouquet garni of thyme, bay and parsley stalks
- 50 ml marc de Bourgogne
- 100 ml double cream
- 4 thick slices pain de campagne
- 1 garlic clove, for rubbing the croutons
- salt and white pepper
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · fish · alcohol
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 lardons, then brown the small onions and the mushrooms in the same fat until glazed and squeaking. Lift the garniture out and hold it aside.
- Sweat the sliced onion and crushed garlic in the 50 g butter without letting them colour, add the wine, bouquet and 250 ml water and simmer 20 min, until the broth no longer smells sharp. 20 min
- Slide the fish in by firmness: eel first, pike and tench four minutes later, perch last. Keep the pan at a shiver and lift each piece out the moment the flesh parts from the bone at a fork's nudge. Keep them warm.
- Whisk a beurre manié of the softened butter and flour into the broth in small knobs, simmer two minutes until it coats a spoon, then add the cream and reduce to a light nappé.
- Warm the marc, flame it into the sauce, return the garniture to heat through and correct the salt.
- Fry the bread in butter, rub it with the garlic clove, and serve the fish in warm bowls under the sauce with the croutons alongside.
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.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
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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