Poached Salmon Recipe: Girardet Method

lovewater66 (54)in Italy • 2 years ago

My wife and I eat salmon about once every week and I usually cook it the same way in the oven with a garlic, lemon and Dijon mustard sauce. But I recently read about a poaching technique that I really wanted to try thats called the Girardet method. I gave it a shot a few days ago.

The technique was invented by a Swiss chef named Frédy Girardet and involves submerging a filet of fish in a pan of cold wine to poach under an ovens broiler. You leave the skin exposed to the broiler until it gets crispy and the fish is fully cooked. The fish rests on a thin bed of shallots to avoid it coming in contact with the pan and basically poaches in the wine as it heats up from the broiler. The Science of it is quite interesting as well so I'm going to share that with you below.

The Science

There are a couple things at work here. Firstly the broiler cooks using radiant heat (not convection) and the skin on the fish is shiny so it actually reflects away a lot of the radiant heat from the broiler, which gives the fish time to cook all the way through in the liquid. At first only a small portion of heat is absorbed into the fish (10%) but the amount increases as the skin begins to darken (75% at 5 minutes and 90% at 6 minutes). The wine is clear so the radiant heat travels through it and begins to heat the pan, which in turn begins to heat the wine.

Interestingly, alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water and as the broiler begins to heat up the wine it begins to evaporate quite rapidly.

The evaporating effect cools down the wine and allows the fish to poach in the liquid at a very low temperature. I've tried to show some of these processes in the photo below. The red squiggles represent heat and the blue represent the evaporation process.

You do need to be a little careful though because as the skin begins to brown it loses its reflective properties and starts to absorb more and more heat. This makes the cooking process increase quite rapidly, which is often the case when you broil food. Basically as the color of the food changes from light to dark it begins to absorb more and more radiant energy and begins to cook faster and faster. Often food in the broiler goes from uncooked to burnt in a matter of minutes, so the last minute or two can be quite crucial.

The entire process with the fish though takes around 5-8 minutes depending on the oven and how much wine is in the pan, but regardless you definitely have to keep an eye on it for the last few minutes to make sure that the skin doesn't burn. Once the skin is golden brown and/or crispy, it is finished. Even at the end of the cooking process the wine shouldn't be too hot either.

Ingredients

There aren't many Ingredients involved in this recipe since it mainly focuses on the cooking technique but what I used was the following.

• Salmon
• Shallots and/or thinly sliced onions
• Garlic
• Lemon
• Dry white wine (Cab Blanc, Chardonnay or an equivalent)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 250°C. You may have to turn it down if you notice the wine getting too hot too quickly or if your slice of fish is much thinner than what I've shown.

The wine shouldn't boil at any point during the cooking process.

Start by slicing up the shallots quite thin and/or some onions; they are practicality the same thing in this case. As you can see, I ran out of shallots so I supplemented with onions.

Spread the shallots over the pan and make a bed to rest the fish on.

Place the fish on the shallots.

I sliced some garlic and lemons and added them to the pan as well. I thought that they would add more flavor to the dish but to be honest I didn't actually notice them.

Pour white wine into the pan. It took close to a full bottle for me. Luckily, for cooking I buy cheap 2€ wine.

I wasn't able to completely submerge the fish in the wine so some of the flesh was exposed a little. It wasn't a huge deal though because the steam created by the evaporating wine was enough to cook the fish and keep it moist.

Put the pan into the oven and cook for 6-8 minutes until the skin is browned and crispy or until the fish is cooked through. Its hard to check the fish so it's a bit of a guess.

Also begin to watch the fish around the 5 minute mark, if not sooner, to make sure that the skin doesn't burn.

Also, be careful putting the pan in the oven because the liquid makes the pot quite heavy and very unstable. You might want to use two hands here.

A Mild Disaster

So I had a bit of a disaster at one point. I took the fish out of the oven to check it and it happened to be a little under cooked so I had to put it back in the oven. I opened the oven door and as I did I twisted my wrist slightly and the heavy pan tilted and dumped hot wine all over the floor and into the oven itself.

Luckily the fish stayed in the pan but it made a massive mess. I recommend using two hands when transporting the pan in and out of the oven.

I didn't take many pictures after the event because I was in a bit of a mood as you can imagine. Dumping half a bottle of wine in the oven and floor will do that to a person.

What I would do Differently

Besides using two hands when transporting the pan there are a two things that I would do differently if I were to try this technique again. For starters I would use a smaller pan that was only a little bigger than the slices of fish. This would allow for less wine to be used which would be less wasteful and which would make it easier to handle. Similarly, I would also use a pan with flat sides instead of tapered ones to further reduce the amount of liquid required to submerge the fish.

My Overall Takeaway

Personally, I don't think I would bother doing this method again or even recommend it to others to try. The salmon was cooked nicely but the amount of work involved, and the amount of wasted wine just isn't worth it to me and you can generally achieve similar, if not better, cooking results when you cook salmon in the oven using convection. I didn't find that poaching it in the wine added any additional flavor either. If anything it made it more bland somehow, sort of like what happens when you boil meat. Both my wife and I agreed that the meal was pretty much flavorless despite me putting salt, pepper and lemon juice and zest on top before serving.

I'm not disappointed or upset that I tried it and I thought that it was an interesting technique and learning experience, but I definitely won't be doing it again in the future.