Lyon & Burgundy · Main
Quenelles de Brochet, Sauce Nantua
- Advanced
- 80 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, melting away silken.
Ingredients
- 300 g pike fillet, skinned, pin boned and well chilled
- 250 ml whole milk
- 125 g plain flour
- 60 g butter, for the panade
- 200 g cold butter, diced
- 3 eggs plus 2 yolks
- 10 g fine salt
- 2 g white pepper
- 1 g nutmeg, freshly grated
- 500 g whole freshwater crayfish, live or frozen
- 1 carrot and 1 shallot, finely diced
- 30 g tomato purée
- 50 ml marc de Bourgogne
- 150 ml Bourgogne Aligoté
- 300 ml double cream
- 60 g butter, for mounting the sauce
- 1 sprig tarragon
Equipment
Sheet pan · Grater / zester
The skills inside
Roasting in a hot ovenSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedSalted water & the float testStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg · fish · shellfish · 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
- Panade: boil the milk with the 60 g butter and half the salt, draw off the heat and rain in the flour, then dry the paste over low heat, beating hard, until it balls up and films the base of the pan. Spread it thin on a tray and chill until stone cold.
- Blend the pike to a smooth paste with the rest of the salt, work in the cold panade, then the eggs and yolks one at a time, then the diced cold butter. Keep the bowl on ice throughout; the mixture must stay below 12C (54F) and hold a soft peak on the spatula. Rest it two hours in the fridge.
- Sauce: roast the crayfish until scarlet, pick the tails, crush shells and heads and sweat them with the carrot, shallot and tomato purée, flame with the marc, add wine and cream and simmer 20 min. Press hard through a fine sieve, add the tarragon, then mount with the 60 g butter off the heat. 20 min
- Shape quenelles between two wet spoons and slide them into salted water held at 78 to 80C (172 to 176F), so the surface only shivers. Turn once. They are ready when they have doubled, roll over on their own and feel springy under a finger, about 12 min. 12 min
- Drain on a cloth, set in a buttered dish, nap with the Nantua and scatter over the crayfish tails.
- Bake at 200C (390F) until the sauce blisters at the edges and the quenelles swell again, about 8 min. 8 min
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.
Roasting in a hot oven 56 recipes
- The oven was fully up to heat before anything went in, given time beyond the indicator light rather than judged by it.
- Every piece has air around it. Nothing touches its neighbour and nothing is packed to the edge of the tray, because crowded food steams itself in its own moisture and never browns.
- Colour is even across the whole tray, the tray having been turned at least once: no pale row at the back and no dark row at the front.
- It came out BEFORE the target temperature, not at it. Carryover keeps driving the inside up by several degrees after it leaves the oven, and that rise is part of the cooking rather than an error in it.
- The temperature was read at the coldest part rather than the easiest one to reach, and read again after the rest.
Where it goes wrong The tray was crowded, or the oven was not truly up to heat. The food releases steam faster than a cool box can carry it away, so it sits pale and slack, and the extra minutes spent chasing colour take the inside well past where it should have stopped.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
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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