Salmon in Brie-and-Bacon Sauce, with Asparagus and Crispy Potatoes

I used to be one of those guys who ruined every fish that wasn’t a stick. Thankfully, I stumbled onto a salmon-cooking method that is flat-out fool-proof, yet produces fantastic results.

It’s also quick. I can rush through the store on the way home from work, pick up a nice piece of salmon, multitask rushing it into the oven and me into some comfortable clothes, and I’ve got a wonderful dinner in front of me in less time than it takes for Danny Rand to fight off a pack of ninjas. (I’ve been binging Iron Fist.)

In a weekday rush, I might pair the salmon with leftover sides, or ready-to-go items I picked up while I was salmon shopping. Fleshing it out into a full menu from scratch – including a homemade sauce, as I’ve done for this post – doesn’t take that much more time, but it does require an intense flurry of culinary karate that you might not be able to muster on a weeknight.

Brie and Bacon Sauce

½ lb bacon, diced
½ cup chicken broth
5½ Tbs butter
½ cup AP flour
3 cups milk (2% works well)
1 cup (about 4 ounces) freshly grated Parmesan
3 oz. Brie, rind more-or-less removed and discarded, sliced into chunks
Salt
2 tsp cracked black pepper

Fry the bacon to moderately-crispy. Set aside. Pour off the grease and reserve it. Deglaze the pan with stock. Pour the contents of the pan into a measuring cup. Add milk to the measuring cup until you have 3 cups of liquid. Pour into a saucepan and heat just until steam begins to roll off the milk’s surface, and bubbles begin to appear at the edges of the pan. Meanwhile, prep a roux.

In the pan you just deglazed, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Add the flour. Cook and stir until it simmers. Lower heat and continue to simmer for 2 minutes. At this point, white sauce recipes often become highly technical. Maybe I’m missing something, but I find the process pretty forgiving. Pouring the entire roux into the milk all at once works just fine, so long as you focus your chi and become the whisk (i.e. whisk like crazy). As soon as the sauce thickens (which takes at the most a minute), off heat. Whisk in the Parmesan. Once it’s fully incorporated, whisk in the brie. Salt (a lot, surprisingly) to taste. Thin out the sauce with warm milk if necessary. Stir in pepper. Stir reserved, chopped bacon into the sauce, or use it as a garnish over the sauce (or both).

Notes:

1. You might want to start by prepping the brie, and then leave it on the counter as you work the recipe. At a warm room temperature, it will meld into the sauce more easily.
2. My favorite way to dice the bacon is to treat the slab as a simple rectangle, ignoring the individual bacon slices. Simply slice thin strips along the long side of the rectangle, and then dice pieces from your strips. You must use a very sharp (chef’s) knife. A run-of-the-mill knife will not cut it.
3. While multitasking the roux and milk, if one of them seems to be moving faster than the other, turn down (or off, for a few minutes) the heat on the faster of the two. With a bit of juggling, you’ll get them both to reach the finish line together.
4. The sauce reheats well, so it’s easy to prepare in advance. A crust may develop on the surface as the sauce cools, but you can easily whisk it back into the sauce as you reheat it.
5. This recipe makes more sauce than you may need. You could cut the recipe in half and still have enough for four. However, although it’s intended for the fish, if you love it so much that you want to lavish it on the side dishes as well (as I do), then half the recipe may not be enough for four. Leftover sauce keeps well in the fridge and is fantastic over pasta!

Crispy Roast Potatoes Recipe

I found this potato recipe on Serious Eats. It’s fantastic. The original calls for duck fat. I substituted bacon fat because the brie sauce conveniently produced it. Duck fat is great, but it’s hyped beyond it’s greatness. This bacon version is wonderful.

4½ lbs russet potatoes, rinsed, cut into 2-inch chunks
1 Tbs white vinegar
Kosher salt
¼ cup rendered bacon fat
Butter (optionally)
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp dried thyme

Preheat the oven to a full, open-throttle 500°F and turn on the AC.

Place the potatoes in a pot and add water until they’re covered by an inch. Add the vinegar and 2 Tbs salt. Bring to a simmer, and cook until they’ve softened, but are deliberately undercooked, no more than five minutes. Meanwhile, retrieve the bacon fat you rendered while making the brie sauce.

If the fat has hardened, melt it. If it’s shy of the required amount, supplement with melted butter. Strain the potatoes. Spread them onto sturdy, rimmed baking sheets. Pour the fat evenly over them, and toss roughly. Sprinkle generously with salt, modestly with pepper, then with the thyme. Bake for 20 minutes, swapping rack positions half-way through. Remove from oven and flip or toss them. Return to oven for another 20 minutes, with another rack switch at the half-way point. The potatoes are done when they are decidedly brown and crispy.

Notes:

1. You could peel the potatoes … but why?
2. My favorite way to chunk up the potatoes is to slice them in half lengthwise, lay each half flat and slice it into four equal-width strips. Quadrisect the strips. (This varies, or course, according to the size of your spuds.)
3. You should consider whether your baking sheet is cleared for this high a temperature. Some fancy-pants pans have upwards limits well below what this recipe calls for. A so-so baking sheet will probably flex at this high a temperature. I’m not sure if that matters, since when it cools, it will return to its original shape, but I’m no scientist. In my opinion, the very best baking sheets are the heavy-duty, 16-gauge aluminum, completely simple workhorses that eventually turn all kinds of ugly because they’re so impossible to clean but who cares.
4. You can toss the potatoes with the fat in a bowl and them transfer them to the sheets, if washing lots of dishes is more your style.

Austere Roasted Salmon

1 salmon fillet, 1½ to 2 lbs
4 Tbs (½ stick) butter
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste (optional)

Make sure the fish will fit in your sheet pan. You may have to cut it in half to get it to fit. Melt the butter in the sheet pan, in a 475°F oven. Lay the fish into the buttery pan, skin-side up. Bake for 4 minutes, or until the skin easily peels off. Once you’ve peeled the skin off, (season the fish), flip it, (season the other side), and return it to the oven until it reaches desired doneness, about 3 minutes more.

Notes:

1. This is a wonderful way to prepare salmon, even if you’re not intending to sauce it. If that’s how you’re going to roll, though, take a look at the original recipe that I used as the model for this one. It’ll suggest some herbs and garnishes.
2. Time it so that you’re able to start melting the butter just as soon as the potatoes come out of the oven. Leave the potatoes in their pans, on cooling racks. The salmon cooks fast; the potatoes will still be quite warm and crispy when dinner’s ready. If you fear the potatoes will cool, you could loosely tent them (still in their pans).
3. I love salmon unseasoned, even if I’m not saucing it – and especially when it’s prepared in this way. It’s moist, delicate, and doesn’t need any embellishment. Maybe subtly muted, but I like it that way. Do as you wish.

Salmon Rushdie: Salmon in Bacon-and-Brie Sauce

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This content was not solicited, nor written in exchange for anything. In putting this post together, I relied on these sites: Epicurious, Serious Eats, Cooking Section of the NY Times

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