SALMON IN FILO PASTRY WITH TWO SAUCES
And as some meals are completely disastrous, other meals just work in perfect symbiosis, without the cook even really trying.
When I left for work yesterday morning, I had not the foggiest notion of what to prepare for that evening’s supper. I knew that I had minced beef, frozen peas, bags of mystery produce and some fish, all crammed into my once-seemed-large-but-now-seems-tiny freezer.
Well, we haven’t had salmon in a while, I thought and I knew that I had some lovely salmon fillets tucked away somewhere, underneath some frozen blackberries. Now, what to do with it?
So, I got to work and started scrolling through pages of salmon recipes until I came across one that caught my eye (and taste buds): salmon en croute! Of course! I love salmon, I love pastry! Perfetto!
The traditional salmon en croute recipe uses puff pastry, of which I had half a packet left over from Nigella’s chickpea filo pie that I made ages ago. The recipe also used pea puree and a herby butter which you slathered the salmon with before encasing it in pastry.
Now, I didn’t have half the ingredients for all the additional fripperies (i.e. the posh peas and the fancy butter) so I utilised my previous knowledge of cooking similar things and came up with slightly-posher-than-normal-but-not-that-posh mushy peas and shallot butter.
Anyway, the outcome of the dish was this: Tim raved about it, I raved about it, the cat raved about the skin from the salmon – everyone was happy.
Modifications
If you don’t like salmon, or it’s very costly, you could use cod, hake or haddock fillets instead.
Prep Ahead
This dish is perfect to prepare in advance. You can make both the mushy peas and the butter a couple of days in advance, keeping them covered with some clingfilm and refrigerated.
You can also make the complete parcels in advance, wrapping them in clingfilm or popping them in a Ziplock bag and refrigerating overnight, and freezing.
SALMON IN FILO PASTRY WITH TWO SAUCES
INGREDIENTS
- 2 Salmon Fillets Remove the skin.
- 150 g Filo pastry About 16 sheets.
- 30 g Butter melted, for brushing the filo pastry with
For the Shallot Butter:
- 30 g Butter unsalted
- 2 Shallots finely chopped
- ¼ tsp Capers
- Salt and Pepper
Mushy Peas Recipe is here
INSTRUCTIONS
Mushy Peas
- Make the mushy peas as per the recipe here. If you like, you can refrigerate this overnight if you don't intend to make the parcels today.
Shallot Butter
- To make the shallot butter, simply squidge together the butter with the finely chopped shallot and capers and season well. As per the mushy peas, you can refrigerate this for a couple days too.
To make the parcels
- Preheat oven to 200c
- On the baking tray that you intend to bake the fish parcels on, carefully lay a sheet of filo pastry.
- Brush it with the melted butter, lay another sheet on top, brush with butter, and continue until you have used eight sheets up.
- Put half of the mushy pea mixture, roughly the size of the salmon, in the middle of your filo pastry.
- Lay one of the salmon fillets on top of the peas, then smear half of the shallot butter on top of the fish.
- Bring up one side of the pastry over the salmon, brush with butter, then repeat with the opposite side, and finally the shorter sides. Your salmon should now be completely encased, like a parcel.
- Brush once more with butter and turn the parcel over so that the seams are facing downwards.
- Brush the top with butter.
- Repeat with the second salmon fillet.
- Bake in the over for 30 minutes, or until the filo has started to go golden and crisp. Any longer than this and you run the risk of the fish drying out.
- When you cut the fish open, the delicately flavoured butter will ooze out onto your plate. Delicious!
