I haven’t posted in a while as I have been really busy with work, including a trip to London last week for dinner at the Inner Temple, where I am an Academic Fellow.
I can say without hesitation that I have had some of the best meals of my life at the Inner Temple, and last week’s dinner was no exception! The main course was breast of duck with dauphinoise potatoes, Chantenay carrots, green beans and a black cherry sauce, which had a real kick to it. Desert consisted of a huge portion of sticky toffee pudding with malted milk ice-cream (divine – I cannot wait to get my ice-cream maker out again, once the Welsh weather takes a long-awaited turn for the better!).
However, the star dish of the evening for me was a quenelle of pike with a Sauce Nantua. I had never heard of Sauce Nantua before (and I think this may have been my first time eating pike too), but this intensely fishy sauce was an absolute revelation. I spent most of my train journey back to Bangor wondering how I could recreate this delicious sauce from home!
Some internet research revealed that Quenelles de Brochet Sauce Nantua is a popular dish in Lyonnaise cuisine. Amazingly, they even sell a tinned version in France!
The sauce takes its name from Lake Nantua, where the crayfish that give the sauce its fishy base are caught, and pike (‘brochet‘) are caught from the river Rhône. The reason they are served in quenelles is that pike is a very bony fish, so it makes sense to create bone-free dumplings by mixing the de-boned fillets of fish with cream, eggs and seasoning and leaving the mix to set overnight.
Some day, when I manage to source both pike and whole crayfish in North Wales, I will make this recipe. In the meantime, I set to making a cheat’s version, seen above, served with sea bass fillets and wild rice.
Ingredients (serves 2)
25g butter
5 shallots, very finely chopped
1 red chilli, deseeded and very finely chopped
1 clove garlic, very finely chopped
25g flour
1 tbsp tomato puree
pinch of saffron
pinch of cayenne pepper
125ml fish stock (I used one Knorr fish stockpot)
1/2 tin chopped tomatoes
120g crayfish tails (I used these; if you can get unpeeled crayfish tails, even better – use the shells to make an even more intense sauce)
75ml cream
Method
1. Melt the butter, and sauce the shallots, garlic, and chilli over a low heat until soft.
2. Add the flour and stir, then add the tomato puree, saffron, cayenne pepper and a pinch of salt and pepper. Gradually add the tomatoes, stirring constantly, and the fish stock. Bring to a boil then add the crayfish tails. Leave to simmer over a low heat, stirring every now and again, until the sauce has reduced by about half and the flavour has intensified. Taste, adding more seasoning if necessary.
3. Liquidise the sauce in a blender until it is a smooth consistency. You can pass it through a sieve at this stage if you prefer a smoother sauce (I didn’t).
4. Return the sauce to a saucepan, gradually heat, and add the cream. Serve immediately.
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I had some leftover sauce, which I served for lunch the next day with a boiled egg and some crusty bread, scattered with some parsley leaves. I love throwing together lunch from what’s left in the fridge, and this one was surprisingly tasty (although the photo below admittedly looks a little odd – I wanted to recreate the look of the clean quenelle of pike sitting in the thick, rich, Sauce Nantua that I had seen two nights previous, but failed somewhat on that front!)
Yvo Cooks 