Sunday, 22 January 2012

• Salmon Hot Dog

  This is a guest post from Playing With Fire and Water.

  

  There's a virtually untapped world of specialty malted grains made for the beer brewing industry that can be used to add unique flavor to baked goods. Two stand-outs are: smoked barley (gives Rauchmalz its smoky aroma) and chocolate rye (contributes nutty, caramel notes to dark stouts and Porters). Over the past year, I've tested them in everything from laminated pastries* to cookie doughs** with great effect, but it is the realm of yeasted doughs where they seem most at home. The robust complexity that chocolate rye adds to pumpernickel makes the original pale in comparison.

  

  The virtue of making condiments lies in customization and enhanced flavor. Commercially made Dijon mustards taste flat and boring in comparison to the ones you can make yourself. The process starts with shallots and garlic simmered in Chardonnay. The reduced infusion is strained and blended with brown mustard powder, olive oil, and a few drops of honey. Sometimes, I customize it with various herbs and aromatics, but I always let it sit at room temperature for at least 2 weeks to ripen the flavor before storing in the refrigerator, where it will keep for three months or longer. It's a small effort for a big flavor; too big, it turns out, for my delicately flavored salmon hot dog.

  Coincidentally, I was working on an orange horseradish*** puree for a pork dish that needed a nudge in the flavor department. A whole orange and peeled horseradish root had been steamed in a pressure cooker with white wine, then the whole lot pureed. Pressure cooking removes the acridity from the horseradish and softens the bitterness in the orange's pith, producing a puree with a mellower flavor than you would think possible from the raw ingredients. 

  For the salmon hot dog, I punched up the puree by blending it with an equal amount of homemade Dijon, and— because I love citrus with salmon— I added microplaned orange zest. Mixing horseradish with mustard made sense because they both belong to the Brassica family, a simple observation that opened a new pathway to a great condiment.  

   

  

  • salmon sausage in leek casing
  • chocolate rye roll
  • horseradish orange mustard
  • kefir fermented daikon
  • fennel sprouts 

  * Croissants made with smoked barley flour and smoked butter are revelatory.

  ** See pepper cookies

  *** Please, no comments about the horseradish root. I only photographed and cooked the thing, nature did the rest.

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