Pan-Seared Sturgeon with Chanterelles & Baby Yukons
A delicious, dinner-party worthy Pan-seared Sturgeon with green garlic soup sauce, sautéed chanterelle mushrooms, and poached baby Yukon gold potatoes. Recipe courtesy of Chef Andrew Garrison.
What follows is not a traditional recipe. We've estimated the weights and measures, as well as the cooking times, based on our cooking class experience.
Sautéed Chanterelles
Add oil to pan and heat pan on stove to the smoke point. Add mushrooms and sear them. Once they are seared, finish by sautéing in a little butter with fresh garlic, thyme sprigs, and rosemary sprigs [GTR] thrown in. Set aside.
You want the mushrooms to be dry, and you don’t want to move them much once they’re in the pan. You want them to sear.Don’t add salt to the mushrooms until you are done cooking, or you will end up with a pan of soggy mushrooms.
Baby Yukons
Precook the potatoes. Chef Andrew poaches them in duck fat, but if you are short on duck fat at home, you can simply parboil them.
Put the precooked baby potatoes in a pan and make a little hole in the middle. Add 3 tablespoons of butter and few cloves of garlic. Bring the butter to a foaming point and then add some GTR. Glaze the potatoes with the garlic-herb-infused butter, then season with a little kosher salt. Set aside.
Just as you did with the mushrooms, add oil to an oven-safe frying pan and heat on stove to the smoke point. Lay the fish in the hot pan, presentation side down. Sear the fish on one side, and then put it in a preheated oven 425°F (223°C] until it is done medium well. (An internal temperature of 140°F in fish is medium well.) The fish will continue to cook after you remove it from the heat, and will be well done by the time you plate it up.
Once the fish is done, take it out of the oven, flip it over, add some butter and GTR to the pan and baste it. You want the butter to be frothing when you do this to really get all the aromatics going well. If it isn't hot enough, it will make your fish soggy. You want the basting to be a fairly quick process. You don’t want to cook the fish more; you just want to glaze it.
Green Garlic Soup (Sauce)
The sauce used for this dish is basically a variation on vichyssoise, or potato leek soup.Make a simple soup using Yukon Golds, yellow onion, garlic, leeks, and a bunch of green garlic. Finish the soup with some cream, a whole bunch of kosher salt, and a little bit of cider vinegar to adjust the acidity.
Pan Sauce
Warm up the potatoes up in the pan with a little chicken stock. Once the stock is warm and potatoes are warm, reduce the stock a bit and throw a couple of nobs of butter in the pan, along with some aromatics [GTR]. As the stock reduces, keep the pan moving; swirl it around for a bit to keep things emulsified and make a pan sauce. Baste the potatoes in the pan sauce just before plating.Rewarm the sautéed chanterelles at this time, too.
Foraged Greens
For this dish, Chef Andrew used miner’s lettuce, which is plentiful all over the Pacific Northwest throughout the spring. (If foraging isn’t your thing, you can usually find it at farmers’ markets this time of year as well.) Alternatively, a handful of any fresh, tender greens will work.
Notes
GTR = Garlic, thyme, and rosemary.Always use a neutral oil like canola oil. It has a higher smoke point than olive oil and imparts less flavor.For this demonstration, Chef Andrew used cold-smoked white sturgeon, farmed out of Idaho.Brining seasons the fish all the way through and actually firms the flesh a little bit. It also gets rid of that white albumen that often comes out when you cook it. If you are using fish that has been brined and/or smoked for this dish, don’t salt it before you pan-fry it.Green garlic looks like a small leek, and appears in the spring, about the same time as garlic scapes.Always try to use Yukon Gold when you make a smooth pureed soup. Avoid using russet potatoes for smooth, pureed soups: the starch in them is far too grainy.