Tasty Tartare

We spent the first six days of Meat Fab cooking, well, meat in all guises--chicken, beef, pork, game birds like pheasant and cornish hen, rabbit, even alligator (kinda chewy and easy to overcook). Today we moved on to fish, and I couldn't have been happier. We each filleted a whole, head-on striped bass and a whole trout. Chef K. worked on two huge salmon for his demo, one wild-caught and one farm-raised. We cryovacked all of the bass and trout for other classes and spent our production time cooking all of that salmon. 

This class is very laissez-faire...after we fabricate whatever protein we're working with, the chefs basically let us cook it however we want to. We also head into the walk-in cooler and make sides with whatever vegetables and starches we have on hand. Our class works really well together and it's been a lot of fun. Today, everyone kind of did their own thing with the salmon because there was so much of it. Instead of grilling or sauteing a few portions, I decided to take the end pieces--left over after Chef cut the filets into 7 ounce portions--and make a tartare. 

I love raw fish and although I've never made tartare before, I've ordered it enough to have a general idea of what to do and it seemed easy enough. I was also inspired by my friend Becky, who scanned the pictures in my last post before reading it thoroughly and thought that I'd created the beautiful tuna tartare that was actually the handiwork of Laurent Tourondel (the extremely famous chef from BLT Steak)! I knew my tartare wouldn't be as beautiful as that one, but I wanted to see if I could pull one off that at least tasted good.

I looked for some citrus to complement the fish, remembering the delicious tartare with orange segments that Chef M. had made for us in Skills 1. There were no oranges to be found in the cooler, but I did come across a perfectly ripe mango. Mango and salmon...sounded good to me. I diced the mango and minced a couple of shallots and a bunch of parsley. Then, I chopped up the raw salmon into small pieces and tossed it with everything else in a bowl. It looked colorful and appetizing, but needed a kick of some sort, so I added lemon juice to give it some acid and seasoned with salt. So simple!

Look how awesome it looked after I went all fancy and molded it with a ramekin. Chef K. said it looked sexy. Foodies use sex analogies to describe dishes all the time, but still! This totally made my day. I even got a few raw fish-phobes in my class to try it and like it.

My first attempt at tartare