Haddock Filet with Sauce Vin Blanc

for the sauce:

I was in the mood to make some derivative of Hollandaise on Saturday, so I went to the textbook Sauces (James Peterson) and flipped through the chapter on non-integral fish sauces for something to go with the haddock filet defrosted and waiting in the refrigerator. I came across sauce vin blanc and remembered we had a little seafood stock leftover in the freezer downstairs that needed to get used. Half a cup, in fact...the perfect amount for about a cup of sauce (which turned out to be way, way too much for two people and a pound of fish).

The sauce was supposed to have white wine in it (thus the name vin blanc!). The instructions in the textbook had the white wine included in the recipe for the stock...I did not know whether or not there was white wine in the stock, so I added about a tablespoon of vermouth to the half cup of fish stock. Reduced it by about two thirds--removing the water and concentrating the flavor. Some precipitate formed--probably delicious lipids or lipophilic proteins. After removing the reduced stock from the heat and letting it cool, I whisked in two egg yolks.

Now, I've attempted Hollandaise many a time, and it never turns out quite right. I'm no longer intimidated by it...it's a pretty simple sauce to make...but I could never get it perfect. This is because I did not understand the sabayon. See, any sauce needs a thickener full of emulsifiers. I had thought egg would be enough, but did not understand that the egg needed to be heated as it was whisked in order to denature the proteins necessary for the emulsion: the egg needs to be made into a sabayon.

The sabayon requires a very gentle heat applied to an egg/liquid mixture that is being furiously beaten with a whisk. I don't have a double boiler, so I filled a deep stainless steel pan with an ince of water and kept it barely at a simmer. The egg/stock mixture was in a stainless steel bowl that fit snugly into the pan without touching the water. If the bowl got too hot to touch, I lifted it out for a bit to cool it a little.

After a few minutes of beating over gentle heat, the mixture had become a viscous foam, and tripled in volume. Some liquid was still present, but I judged that the mixture was ready. I used Alton Brown's method from "Hittin' The Sauce" (first episode of the eighth season): remove from heat, and whisk in chilled butter cut into tablespoon-sized chunks, returning to heat whenever the residual internal energy of the mixture was insufficient to melt the butter. Peterson says that the traditional recipe calls for 4 oz butter per egg yolk, but that can be halved for a lighter sauce. I ended up using about 6 oz for the two egg yolks to get the sauce to a perfect consistency.

This was, by far, the very best hot egg emulsion sauce I have ever made. It had a thick, creamy consistency and a buttery flavor that coated the tongue with goodness. The fish stock remained as the slightest hint that rather meekly made an appearence after the main blast of butteryum. Andi mistook it for lemon at first, which was interesting to note, as whitefish/butter/lemon is a rather natural ensemble of tastes. Next time (or as a suggestion to anyone who plans to try this sauce) I would use clarified butter. Most of the overwhelming elements of the buttery flavor (like the whey proteins and other milk solids) are removed through clarification, and I think this would allow the fish flavor to come through more completely.

for the fish:

I typically broil fish, but have increasingly found that I get distracted too easily for the fish to turn out well--far too often it's overcooked (including a culinary disaster when I visited Austin and tried to make an integral sauce bercy--may my friends forgive my sins against their palates). So I figured I'd try pan-frying this time. Brushed the filets in pure olive oil while I heated a few tablespoons of the same oil in our carbon steel skillet. Sautéed skin side down for about four minutes, salted the white side, turned, and cooked for one or two minutes longer. (The filets were about three quarters of an inch thick.)

This turned out to be the best job I'd done cooking a fish in quite a while. It was almost difficult to eat, as the fork cut through the buttery (have I used that word too much?) texture. Unfortunately, the skin did not turn out so well--it was cooked to the pan. Probably doesn't help that the pan still hasn't fully recovered from a quiche that was burned in it a week or so ago...needs more scrubbing and serious re-seasoning.

for keeping leftover sauce:

I heard it could be done. The remainder of the sauce spent the night in a mason jar in the fridge. It looked perfect. We figured, omelettes with the sauce for breakfast the next morning! And I'd read that, though risky, if the sauce breaks from the cooling, it can be easily repaired by preparing another sabayon and then whisking in the broken sauce. I failed to do that successfully. And not only did the sauce break, but the whey separated from the milk fat--it broke and curdled! Ah well...for the forseeable future, I'll only prepare hot egg emulsion sauces if all of it will be eaten right away.

During this cooking adventure, we were at the edge of Tropical Storm Hannah (she had not yet transitioned to extratropical form). A light shower all day and an overcast day, with a blustery evening, was all we got from her. Such a disappointment--I'm only ever at the edge of a good tropical cyclone. The clouds weren't even as neat as the ones that I saw in Austin when Rita approached.

Thus concludes my first-ever blog post. Actually, before I go, here is Mark Strand's "The President's Resignation."