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How to Cook Salmon with an Almond Garlic Picatta

How to Make an Almond Garlic Picatta

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Barton Seaver

He is 28, but his culinary resume reads like a seasoned 40-something. Washington, D.C. native Executive Chef Barton Seaver, a StarChefs.com Rising Star of 2006 and recently nominated as a Rising Star Chef by the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, of Hook was taught at an early age about the importance of food.

Dinner in the Seaver home was a seven nights a week family affair. Eating dinner with his family was a communal celebration and involved shopping for the freshest ingredients at local markets, instilling this value in him at a young age. Mac and Cheese was never just out of the box, but prepared with a homemade bamel cheese sauce and pasta made from scratch. Summers spent at a family friends hog farm on the Chesapeake Bay, along with crabbing and going with his father to buy fresh seafood from local fisherman, taught Seaver the importance of supporting local purveyors and using quality and fresh ingredients.

According to Seaver, "Seasonality and locality made sense to me early on." Seaver began his professional career working for popular D.C. restaurants such as Ardeo, Felix, and Greenwood. After years of invaluable kitchen experience, Seaver made his way to Hyde Park, New York, where he trained at the renowned Culinary Institute of America. During his schooling, he spent time in the kitchens of Tru restaurant and The Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton under Sarah Stegner in Chicago.

Upon graduating with honors, he immediately took a fellowship position at C.I.A. as a graduate teacher in both the meat and fish classes. Working in this hands-on environment taught Seaver the importance of proper handling and techniques of exceptionally fresh products, all the while giving him direct access to sources of fish through the eastern seaboard ports. Under the guidance of Chef Corky Clark, he learned to appreciate underutilized species of fish and became a proponent of sustainable ocean products.

Seaver is a certified sommelier through the Sommelier Society of America and is continuing his studies with Wine and Spirits Educational Trust in London. Recently, he was asked to join the Board of Directors of DC Central Kitchen as the culinary force behind the non-profits educational programs. Additionally, he is also active in the Slow Food movement, and recently cooked at the bi-annual Slow Food Terra Madre conference in October 2006 in Italy. Other organization involvements include the Chefs Collaborative, the James Beard Foundation, the National Restaurant Association, the International Seafood Conference, Chefs Congress, a culinary resource to the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Seafood Alliance. As a firm believer in the idea that chefs are the keepers of food culture, he is publishing a monthly article for the online newsletter for StarChefs.com.

In an effort to educate fellow industry members, Chef Seaver will address the issue of sustainability from the perspective of a chef offering solutions to common problems they face in their profession such as buying decisions and their responsibility as the definers of what is fashionable eating. Monthly columns are archived on the StarChefs.com website with new articles posting on the 15th of each month.

How to Make an Almond Garlic Picatta

This video will show how to make an Almond Garlic Picatta for the salmon.

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Salmon

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Endives

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Almond

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Garlic

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Picatta

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Bake

,

Alaskan sockeye

,

Cook

,

Recipe

,

Roast

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How to Make an Almond Garlic Picatta

Ingredients

4 6 oz. pieces of wild Alaskan salmon, skin on and pin bones removed

 

3 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

 

4 heads white endive, sliced in half from top to bottom, remove any brown edge of core

 

½ cup blanched almonds, toasted until golden brown

 

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

 

2 tbsp parsley, chopped finely

 

Sea salt

 

Instructions

1. Pre heat oven to 275 degrees.  Brush salmon filets with oil and season generously with salt and pepper.  Place salmon filets skin side down a baking dish.  Slowly roast in oven until medium doneness, about 25 minutes.

 

 

2. Heat oil in a cast iron pan on high heat.  Place endive cut side down and cook until lightly golden brown.  Add ½ cup of water and reduce heat to a low simmer.  Season with salt and cook until all water is evaporated, about 10 minutes. 

 

3. For the piccata: In a mortar and pestle, crush almonds with olive oil and garlic until they are in small pieces about the size of grains of rice. Stir in oil and parsley.  Season with sea salt.  

 

4. Remove salmon from oven.  Gently turn over.  Skin should peel off very easily.  Discard.  Place two pieces of caramelized endive on each plate.  Place one piece of salmon on top of endive and spoon almond garlic piccata over salmon filet.

 

5. Serve with an arugula salad dressed with shallots, balsamic and extra virgin olive oil.

 

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Transcripts

Barton Seaver: Hi, I am Barton Seaver, today we are cooking off our wild Alaskan sockeye salmon fillet. We have got our caramelized endive brazing off on the back burner here, and right now we are going to showing you how to make a almond garlic piccata. Piccata is an Italian word for just chopped or diced up. So we have got some silvered almonds here that I have toasted off in the oven 3000 ,until they are nice and golden brown, 350, or you could do it in a pan. Now what we are going to do is, just lightly chop these up to give them a nice fine texture. Now don't worry too much about this being uniform. You're never going to get it uniform. But that's the purpose of this. This is a very rustic sauce, and it's supposed to be. Now it's also a very versatile sauce. This goes great with anything from grilled steak to any kind of fish, chicken as well, even vegetables. This is great. Any steamed broccoli or something like that, with just a little of this sauce over the top, it's great, because it has a texture, it's got bites from the garlic that we are going to put in it. It's also got some lemon juice, and a little bit of lemon zest in it that's going to really pick it up and really act like a really nice highlight for all the flavors for anything you put it on. So as I am chopping this up there, we have a nice small knife. It allows me to have greater control over what I am doing, and I think small knifes, small sharp knifes are a lot safer to be using, because you got more control over it, and you can let the knife do the work, instead of a blunt knife having to put all, exerting a lot of pressure on it. So now we've got those lightly chopped up, again, you don't really need to make them uniform. Just put that back into the bowl there. Now we have got cloves of garlic. Now depending on how much you like garlic, you can put in however much you want here. I think about half of one clove would be good enough. This is a microplane, a very fine grater which gets a very nice, thin puree of the garlic. So using a small area of the microplane, just pass the garlic over and you can see it ends up with a very nice little pure. I like this because it's fresh, and it doesn't bruise the garlic so much that it dissipates the flavor of the garlic really. So we've got that in there, I am going to season this up with some kosher salt. Going to add a little bit of chopped parsley here, about a tablespoon of chopped parsley. This is just roughed chopped, again just like the almonds doesn't necessarily have to be of the size or shape, and then we are going to take about a tablespoon, two tablespoons of olive oil. Throw that in there, and then using the microplane again, we are going to do some lemon zest. I like long, clean strokes of this, and you can see what you are getting is this nice, nice pieces of lemon zest. Now that's really going to be the key to the whole dish, as the lemon is what binds this all together and sort of extra cooks the garlic a little bit as it sits there, so good stuff. Just make sure you get all in there. So now our endive here, if I may, is just finishing caramelizing and you can see that sauce is getting a little bit thick and rich. So we are just going to go ahead and turn that off here, and to finish up the piccata, we are going to mix it up gently. This is probably the biggest thing that will actually fit into this bowl, but it's what I have in front of me. Now you want to make sure that the garlic gets well mixed, so that you don't end up with one person having a bite of all the garlic that wouldn't be very tasty. Now this gets better as it sits. I think it's actually best the next day. However, it's fine to make maybe an hour ahead of time, and just let it sit and those flavors to really melt and come together. So it's a little bit dry, so I am just going to add a little touch more olive oil to it. And yes, that's a touch, about a tablespoon. So you get a nice pastel like looking sauce to it, and it's really very nice. That's going to be great with our endive and the salmon. Now the salmon has been very slowly roasting on about 2500, and that's probably about ready. So in the next segment we are going to put this salmon dish altogether on a plate for you.

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