We are fortunate enough to have both a backyard and a front river. What is a front river? Well, if a river is right out your front door it is a front river. And we are lucky enough to have guests that like to fish that front river and bring us home beautiful fresh trout. Then, it is up to us to figure out what to do with these gifts from the clear waters. Yesterday and today we worked with ten beautiful trout. We started filleting the trout in our
second cooking class. We then worked with another culinary cohort to clean the trout and then reassemble the pieces. I say pieces because cleaning trout for the first time in a cooking class can lead to a few errant knife strokes. And that is alright, especially with activa on hand. We reassembled the fish and then used thinly rolled sourdough bread to crust the fish. This is not something knew to our repertoire, though using the pasta machine to roll the bread to an exact thickness was a new step in our process. Similarly, we used to use a paste of flour, egg yolk and heavy cream to adhere the bread to the fish. (Thanks to Gray Kunz) And today, I had the idea of mixing a nut butter with egg white to create a glue of sorts. Alright, the dish in progress was a version of Trout Almondine. The dish inspired the technique. Either way, it worked quite well. In fact, I plan to see what else can be glue. Though, that is another path to travel.
After the bread was pressed in place we brushed it with melted butte and seasoned it with salt. That way, we could take the fish and lay it on the EVO and begin a fine griddling of the bread and a slow cooking of the fish. I think our approach to to getting a perfectly griddled toast crust is directly influenced by our work with our co-horts who happen to cook for the staff and are following my obsession with producing the perfect breakfast sandwich. Lets face it, a great breakfast sandwich makes six thirty in the morning seem just fine. Hence, the approach to griddled bread and the story of front river trout.
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