Salmon - Cooking the Endives

Barton Seaver: Hi! I am Barton Seaver. Today, we are cooking Alaskan wild sockeye salmon. We are going to be cooking it with a little bit of braised Endive in an Almond garlic Piccata. Now that we have got our salmon roasting very slowly at 250 degrees, I am going to show you how to start the endive and then we are going into how to make the sauce. So I have got a nice, little, a 10 inch saut pan here. I am going to put it on high heat just to get it rolling little bit. We got a little bit of olive oil. Take about a tablespoon of olive oil, just a light coating at the bottom of the pan. Now this does become part of the sauce. So don't be afraid to use a little bit more olive oil if you think is necessary for the sauting.

Now we have got Belgian endive here. Belgian endive is a very pretty kind of lettuce. So we are just going to be cutting it in half, lengthwise and this is gorgeous stuff. It's very bitter when it is raw, but makes it a very nice ingredient to add into salads because it just adds whole lot of texture and flavor. So we have got these nice, little heads of endive here. Scoot the olive oil around the pan and then you lay your heads in there cut side down because the cut side is where all the sugars are on the inside. So that's what is going to brown. So you want a pan that's just big enough to fit all of the endive because what we are going to end up doing is once we browned it just a little bit, we are going to add in a little bit of water and lemon juice and then just cook it down slowly with that as it begins to caramelize and that's that. So in a few minutes here, the endive will be nice and brown. We will finish out the cooking of this. So now the endive has been cooking for a few minutes, it's beginning the to golden brown on the other side. I will just show you one piece right here and that's ready, just the cut end, just starting to get caramelized. So I will turn that back over. So what we are going to do now is add in about two tablespoons of water and juice of about half of a lemon and some salt and that's just going to create just enough steam to really cook these down. You want to -- not for submerge them, but just to create the steam that will cook them through. You want to leave them a little bit of texture. So we will add our salt in there. Again, that's kosher salt. We got our water. I am going to turn the heat down a little bit on this so we don't -- there is our water. Juice of half a lemon. Now if you can see in this pan, the water turned a little bit brown almost instantly and what that did is it removed those caramelized little bits from the pan as they got attached from the lettuce and so this smells awesome, but what we are going to do is just let that boil down to about a syrup. You don't want to boil it till it's dry because you want them to be coated and glazed and glistening and moist with everything and all that salt will be sucked up through the lettuce. This is going to be good.

So what I am going to do is just let this simmer. It's probably going to take another 3-4 minutes. Our salmon has probably got another ten minutes to go on it. So in the next step, I am going to show you how to make an almond garlic piccata.