Next at Home: Tour of Thailand: Practice Catfish

So here we go again, this is the second to last savory dish of this menu and this was a surprising one to me.  A fish that I don't particularly like mixed with a sauce that I wasn't sure would work. 

So this dish started with a couple of broths which I made back on Columbus Day.

The first broth was a chicken broth which included a whole chicken, onion, leeks, carrots, thyme water and ice. 

Everything went into a pot and cooked for 8 hours

The second broth was a fish broth which I used trout (The recipe called for sole), leeks, onions, mushrooms, wine, lemon, parsley, butter, thyme butter and black pepper.

The leek, onion and mushrooms were sweated in the butter.

Then the fish went in.  Again the recipe called for sole and just the bones, but sole isn't available in my area so I fileted out the trout as best as I could to get mostly bones and put it in. 

Then the rest of the ingredients went in and simmered for 20 minutes.

One the broths were done it was time to make the sauce base, which included both the broths, garlic, white pepper, cilantro root, garpeseed oil, palm sugar, fish sauce, shallots and celery.

I combined the garlic, peppercorns and cilantro in a food processor.  Once the mixture was a paste it was sauteed in the grapeseed oil.

Once sauteed, I stirred in the palm sugar  and fish sauce until it turned to basically caramel.

Then the broths went in and reduced until the entire mixture reduced by 1/3.

Once reduced I added the final flavor component of cilantro, shallots and celery.

One of the garnishes was pickled pearl onions.  to make this I needed salt, rice vinegar, sugar and pearl onions.

The salt, vinegar, and sugar were simmered together until combined and then the onions went in and were refrigerated until needed. 

The second garnish is celery ribbons.  I took this celery stalk and stripped it down with a vegetable peeler and then reserved the strips in ice water.

The third and final garnish was blanched celery.  Celery, naturally, celery see, fish sauce, salt, sugar and water. I sliced the celery thin and then mixed all the other ingredients together.  Once the other ingredients had come to a boil the celery went in a stepped for a while.

The closing moment of this dish.  I took the caramel base and warmed it up and then combined it with xantham gum.  Xantham gum is a modified starch that thickens anything its added to.

The main part of this dish was catfish.  Which to cook I took a filet of catfish and seasoned it with salt and pepper.

The seasoned catfish was combined with the grapeseed oil in a vacuum bag and then poached in water for 20 minutes.

Here is the final plate.  I first encountered this phenomenon in the Paris menu of making huge amounts of broth for a very small portion of the plate, but it is what it is.  This was the final plate and while every bite scared me a little bit, I couldn't help but be impressed by the balance of the course.  Catfish tends to be muddy and nasty, but that was well balanced with the other flavors on the plate.