Caviar sauce for Sunday
Mark’s parents got us two little jars of Caviar from St. Petersberg when they went on their Baltic Sea cruise, and we’ve been hanging on to them for “special occasion” – as something as exotic as Russian Caviar would deserve – but it never came up and so I finally had to figure out a way to just use it without throwing a fancy cocktail party. Unlike the super special 25-year-old balsamic we bought in Italy 4 years ago, which we still use, the caviar won’t stay good forever.
The recipe for the sauce came from allrecipes.com: Swedish sour cream + caviar sauce for salmon. It required creme fraiche, which is ridiculously hard to find here in our bland continent of pasteurized dairy – so a homemade substitute was needed. It takes 24 hours to make creme fraiche, but it’s well worth the wait and keeps for 10 days in the fridge.
The salmon was cooked on a grill so that skin goes crisp. According to Jamie Oliver, if you tend to not like salmon skin it’s because you haven’t had it cooked until it’s crispy. And he’s absolutely right (w/ a british accent). We ate the crispy part almost right off the bbq and didn’t have any left by the time I assembled the plates, except that little part on the bottom, but you could hardly tell.
The sauce is really quite amazing and the caviar’s taste is much smoother than I thought, but key to this dinner is to grill the salmon, not bake it.
the sauce look great but the salmon look over cook to me good to know that you are cooking now
mom on 14 September 2009