Uber Delicious Sous Vide Citrus Soy Salmon

Looking back at our blog posts lately, we do seem to be putting up more and more cooking and baking recipes, and not as many restaurant reviews. Perhaps it's because good restaurants worth reviewing aren't usually cheap, and we've discovered that with a little trial, error and effort, you can often get much better value by cooking at home!

Today we're going to bust out the sous vide circulator yet again - but this time we're going to water bathe some fish. A stack of salmon fillets, to be exact. As you can see we've cut the skin off the fillets - this is because with sous vide the skin stays limp and soft, and to be honest not very appetizing. So we just skin the fillets with a sharp knife, and fry them up separately in a pan (don't really need extra oil cos the skin is full of natural fish oil) for a crispy snack.


The first step is to brine the fish. Brining means soaking in a salt solution - what this does to salmon is to inhibit the excretion of albumen (pinkish strands of protein) during the cooking process so you get a more visually appealing fillet. Oh, and it adds moisture, too. You want to mix water, ice and salt in about a 4:2:1 ratio (example, 400ml of water, 200ml of ice and 100ml of salt), soak the fish and leave it in the fridge for about half an hour before cooking. Make sure the water is as cold as possible! Brining in water at higher temperatures could cause food safety issues.


Once that's done, mix up about 1 tablespoons each of minced garlic and ginger, 1 tablespoon of any kind of citrus (orange juice, lime juice, lemon juice) and 1 teaspoon of soy sauce for each fillet. Mix it, dish it into your vacuum pack or ziplock bags, and we're ready to bathe!


Surprisingly, salmon doesn't take all that long to cook. 25 minutes is sufficient at anywhere from 48°C (rare) to 52°C (medium rare) to 60°C (medium), depending on how you like your fish. Try not to cook it past more than 40 minutes as although it won't technically overcook, it loses some of its texture and may get a little mushy.


Once done, it's ready to serve! As in most sous vide applications, the low cooking temperature means that the salmon tends to look a little pale. You can serve it as is, or put it under the broiler or blowtorch really quickly just to add a little colour. Serve with whatever takes your fancy - here we've paired the fillet with a side of spaghetti aglio olio and some steamed broccoli.


Looks amazing, tastes even better! The sous vide process ensures evenly cooked juicy fish throughout with melt-in-your mouth consistency. It's an easy dish to whip up, requires hardly any skill, and you can just as easily expand it to a dozen people at a dinner party. Give it a try! I don't think you will be disappointed.

Note: We have an additional SideKIC Kitchen Immersion Circulator available for sale. If you're interested do drop an email at shuigao(at)gmail(dot)com. Singapore, JB and KL only.

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~

Chef at Home: Delicious Miso Crusted Salmon Fillets

If you've been following us, you'll know that we cooked up a kick-ass 5-course dinner for my mum to celebrate Mother's Day. One of the main courses was the Miso Crusted Salmon, so today we'll be giving you the full recipe so you can cook it too!

The recipe we got this from initially called for Cod. Sadly we couldn't find any non-frozen cod fish, so we went for salmon instead, and it actually turned out very well!

Ingredients:
- Salmon Fillets
- Mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine used for cooking, we bought ours at a 100Yen shop)
- Sugar
- Miso


You'll notice from the pic above that since we couldn't find plain miso-in-a-container, and since time was running short, we improvised and bought a pack of instant miso soup instead. It serves the same purpose, just remember to discard (or keep for another day) the tofu and seaweed that comes in the pack.

Anyways, bring 100ml of mirin to a boil, then lower the heat to simmer. Stir in 200g of miso paste - once that's dissolved stir in 100g of sugar until that's dissolved, then take off the heat. Let the mixture cool to room temperature.


Wash your salmon fillets and remove any scales/bones that the fishmonger might have missed out, and slather generously in the sugar-mirin-miso concoction.


As you can see below, we've used a funky individual plastic-bag wrap for each fillet, but that was because we sort of didn't notice that we'd run out of plastic cling wrap. You can use whatever you fancy - spoon/pour any leftover sugar-mirin-miso into the plastic and then marinate the fish in the fridge for at least half a day (preferably overnight or up to 2 days).


When it's time to cook, take the salmon fillets out of the fridge. Use your fingers to wipe off any excess sugar-mirin-miso mixture off the fish, but do not rinse. Toss the fillets into a hot frying pan for a minute or two on each side (just enough to sear the miso to give the fish a slight crust, then bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 deg C for about 10 minutes.

That's it! Easy and quick. Trust us when we say this fish is delicious. The mirin and the miso marinade imparts a hint of sweetness to the salmon, and the sear before bake ensures that the fish retains a ton of juice. The resulting fillet has a slightly firm/crusty surface, but is just juicy all over inside.


So go ahead and try it for yourself! Preparation and cooking time are 10-15 minutes each, and you can prep in the morning before work, toss the salmon into the fridge, then come back home and it'll be ready for you to sear/bake and eat a delicious restaurant-quality salmon fillet.

(Unfortunately, mirin contains alcohol, so not strictly halal. Alcohol burns off during the cooking process though.)

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~

Home Cured 'smoked' Salmon 'gravlax' style

Smoked Salmon is awesome. Salmon Gravlax is also awesome. But both are equally as expensive as they are awesome. So the obvious solution, then, is to cure your own salmon at home!

From our research on the 'net (I know, right? If you read it on the Internet it *must* be true!), it seems that it's impossible to properly smoke salmon at home, because with traditional hot smoking, you'd end up just having cooked salmon. Which also rocks, by the way, but that's not what we're going for.

What we're going to do is to salt-cure our salmon, which is a surprisingly easy process. Start off with a decent-sized salmon fillet - it needs to be as fresh as possible! Skin-on and skin-off doesn't make any difference to the process, but having the skin on makes it easier to slice later.

The base ingredients are as follows: 1 part salt and 1 part sugar, and that's it! The salt and sugar will cure the salmon, drawing the water out of the fillet. Everything else is for flavor - in our first attempt we've added 1/3 part paprika and 1/3 part black pepper. For a 1 pound fillet, '1 part' would be roughly 3 tablespoons.


Wash your salmon and pat it dry. Ideally you'd do this on cheesecloth, but we couldn't find any so we just cut up some coffee filters. What you're looking for is any porous material that will absorb the liquids that will be drawn out by the curing process (kitchen towels won't work cos they'll stick to the salmon and make a mess). This step is just to spread the ingredients all over the salmon.


Salmon fillet nicely coated. You might have noticed that we used brown sugar, there should be no difference if you use white.


Wrap up the salmon with 3 or 4 layers of absorbent material as there will be quite a lot of fluids. Finish off with plastic wrap, then toss it into the fridge! You get better results if you weigh down the fish - just grab a plate, put it on top of the salmon, and then weigh it down with a can or two of ... you know. Whatever you have in your house.


The salmon needs to sit in the fridge for two full days - turn it over once during that time. After the two days, take it out, and tadaa!


Rinse down the salmon on all sides well. With filtered, distilled or boiled water, of course.


Slice and serve and you're done! For garnishing purposes we rubbed some cracked black pepper on the fillet before slicing.


Verdict: Yummy! It's surprising how little effort this actually took to make. And while it doesn't taste exactly like smoked salmon, you know, cos we didn't actually smoke it, it does taste pretty good. Do give it a try! Total prep time is like 15 minutes, so saying that you're too busy is no excuse.

If you're worried about bacteria and all that, you shouldn't. Salt Curing is a food preservation method that has existed since ancient times, and our ancestors managed to get by without getting extinct from food poisoning, didn't they? But if you do want to be absolutely safe, head to Jusco and buy a sushi/sashimi-grade hunk of salmon.

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~