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I've received some interesting gifts over the years, but I must say that this is the first time I received a bag of fish as a present. I have a great deal of empathy for my two daughters who more or less feel obliged to come up with a unique present for me on special occasions. Lately the emphasis has been on food and drink of an exotic variety, and I can't be more pleased with that trend. I love eating gourmet foods and have even attempted cooking an item or two. But, this is going to be a major challenge. Back in the old days on certain Christmas Eve dates we ate at a place called Dover Straights. This was an up scale fish house that had a marvelous Dover Sole with some kind of specialty sauce on their menu. The fish was exceptional and very delicate. But the sauce was a one of a kind that I've never tasted before. To be honest about it the sauce made the fish even more of a delight. Before we left town Dover Straights closed up shop. I don't think I've had Dover Sole since that time, or if I did I can't recall the occasion. I mentioned all this to my oldest daughter when she visited us for Thanksgiving, and I guess that is what gave her the idea.
The above Dover Sole weighs in at one pound and was shipped overnight from Seattle. There are 25+ fillets in that bag which will be at least six meals for my wife and I to enjoy. I never question the cost of such gifting, but I do recall the Dover Sole being the most expensive item on the menu at the fish place. I never prepared sole before so that I am very uncertain about how to go about preparing a meal that is up to the quality of the fish. I probably won't attempt cooking any until after Christmas. We are going up north for the holidays and I don't expect to be cooking.
I looked up Dover Straits and discovered that the original restaurant is still in business. They were located close to where I worked which was about 25 miles from home at that time, and that is where they still are. In the interim they opened up a second restaurant only a few miles from my home, and that is the one in which we celebrated Christmas Eve until they closed. My last visit to the original place was on my 60th birthday, some 17 years ago. It was a surprise party to celebrate what was a landmark year for me. Of course they made sure I had Dover Sole, and that was the last time I did if my memory serves me correctly.
While perusing their website I was happy to see their menu, which still offers Dover Sole. It is indeed high priced at $38.50 for two or three fillets. The surf and turf was a little more expensive, but that's two meals in one as far as I'm concerned. Of most interest to me was they mentioned the sole was served with an amandine sauce, which American chefs call Almondine. I was elated until I did a search for how to make this sauce. It turns out Almandine is a generic sauce that can be prepared any number of ways, but always includes almonds. I suppose i will have to experiment, but I'm also thinking of contacting the executive chef of Dover Straits to see if s/he would be willing to give me the recipe. No doubt I won't be able to prepare it as they do, but half the fun is in the effort.
You'll be lucky if they part with their recipe. But it will be great if they told you how you could make one simple one on a smaller scale.
I know from being in the restaurant business, some recipes just cannot be scaled down and taste quite the same.
Part of that has to do with how it is prepared in steam kettles, which are a lot different than a double boiler, which can never get that hot for one.
Like back when I worked at the cannery. They had to heat tomato based products much hotter than is possible to do at home.
This was true for a lot of canned goods too. Try cooking dried beans in the canning jar and you will still have dried beans. But in the autoclaves, they come out fully cooked and soft, just as they should be, and more flavorful too.
You are right about trade secrets, and chefs are notorious for being tight lipped. The truth is that all I remember is the almonds and the creaminess of the sauce. I would guess any number of variations that come close would satisfy my old fuzzy memory. You are also correct about restaurant kitchens being unlike home kitchens. They cook in quantity and have equipment I could not afford to buy even if I had a place to put it. But, this dover sole is not the most popular item on their menu. It's price would turn off more than a few people. So, I'm thinking maybe the chef does the sauce on demand instead of making a whole pot of it. I haven't decided yet what I'll do, but my friend Google has a lot of ideas I can try before I attempt to duplicate a secret sauce.
I have a recipe for poached cod which is absolutely delicious. I can't always find cod in this plain vanilla town so that we don't have it very often. But the idea of poaching fish fillets is very appealing to me. The sole is thin compared to most other fish cuts so that it will require some very careful cooking in order to preserve its appeal. I'll probably make my first attempt for New Years Eve dinner. Seems like a great time to try something new.
I'm sure whatever you come up with will be most pleasant.
As for me, my wife couldn't have a steak come out right if her life depended on it, hi hi.
But she tries, all too often I might add.
About the only fish I like is cod and catfish.
My late wife loved salmon and would buy it by the case.
She had a special steam cooker she fixed them in, and they actually tasted great.
She also about blew her top when I tried doing some catfish fillets in it.
Apparently catfish takes longer than her cooker was designed to do.
I've heard of steamed vegetables, but not steamed fish. Then again, why not?
Salmon is an interesting fish in that it tastes great even when it's not cooked. I think I probably under cook salmon when I prepare it because the flavor and juices need slow cooking. Steak, on the other hand, is pretty easy to prepare because it tastes best when it is charred. LOL The secret to success there is to char the outside while preserving the middle at a tender stage. I got myself an instant read thermometer mostly for cooking steak. The cuts I get can be anywhere from 1/2 inch to 1 1/4 inches thick, all of which require different cooking times to hit that sweet spot of 140F at its core. There is a general rule that a 1 inch steak should cook 4 minutes per side. That does work pretty well on the outside grill, assuming the grill is at the right temperature. Now that I'm thinking about it, I can see why your wife could have a problem getting it right.
The plan I had for cooking the first sole on New Years Eve has changed, unfortunately. We were scheduled to take a trip up toward Chicago and meet with our relatives up there over a four day period. The Christmas Day Extravaganza, however, had to be canceled due to two of the relatives testing positive for Covid. After giving it some consideration, my wife and I decided it would be best not to travel at this time. This means the Dover Sole will likely be prepared for Christmas Eve instead. I have the toasted almonds in stock. All I need now is to figure out the rest of the sauce.
I don't know a whole lot about the thing she used to cook her salmon in.
I do know she had to put distilled water in the thing.
The salmon sat on a grate with the wires close together, about the space of bird cage wires.
Then the lid itself had several points that touched the fish and one larger point that poked into it.
I was trying to picture it in my headbone to see if I could describe it better.
But it was only designed for poaching salmon.
You know. I did some looking around on the web, and I might be mistaken on how her little machine worked.
It's been at least 35 years since she did the cooking, and since I saw her use her salmon cooker.
Heck, it could have worked more like a steak grilling machine too.
Amazing how much one can forget in 35 years, especially when I never used it except once and got in trouble with the frau for doing so, hi hi.
I do remember this, she would NEVER let me cook her salmon on the grill or on a griddle. She liked it one way and one way only, hi hi.
I could not give you a strict definition for poaching, but it has a lot to do with cooking in a liquid. It would be akin to braising meat. The cod I make has a fairly simple sauce that is prepared in advance. The cod is cooked submerged in the sauce and then removed to be served. Then the sauce is disposed of because it's only purpose was to heat and infuse the fish with it's flavors. This process in theory retains the natural juices of the fish and adds some flavor from the cooking liquid. Thinking about what your wife might have used makes me wonder if the fish was not cooked by running an electric current through it. I'd guess that would keep it from drying out if done properly, but surely being there to see it would clear up some questions.
Memory is an odd thing that is not fully understood. They say the brain creates a memory by storing several "concepts" in different parts of the organ. The concepts would include but not be limited to shape, color, movement, sound, smell and whatever other sensory perceptions we might have. When the right combination of concepts is organized into one package, the brain recognizes the object. You know ... it looks like fish. It smells like fish. I feels like fish, It tastes like fish. It must be fish. LOL My point here is that you recall some of the ideas your brain associated with the wife's cooking machine but do not actually recall the machine itself. When you recall said memories you picture the object in your mind and then store it back out into memory again. Only this time the details are fewer and/or missing. So each time you recall a memory it gets fuzzier.
You got that right about the old brain getting fuzzier and fuzzier, hi hi.
Before I built our new kitchen with the Char-Broiler and Griddle, we had a steak cooker that was a thousand times better than those George Foreman grills that came out years later.
It had a large size grease trap in a drawer you could slide out of the unit to clean, for one.
The base was large enough to hold four steaks if necessary, and the lid lifted up and down, not on a floating hinge like later grills. It did have a scissors type of lifting mechanism and the back was held by two large stainless steel tubes it ran up and down on.
You could not make a mistake with this grill! An embossed aluminum with black paint front, and stamped from the back letters then coated in gold paint gave you the time for every steak thickness and done-ness.
There were lights on the front that lit up. A green light came on when the grill was up to temp, and time to toss the steaks on. It would always go out right after you tossed the steaks on, even though you could hear the meat sizzling, but then came right back on again in a couple of seconds. There was a larger red light that said HOT on it, that came on long before the green light came on, and stayed on long after you unplugged the thing.
Between the Green Light and the Big Red Light was a row of seven Amber colored lights, which I'm pretty sure worked on a timer more so than a temperature. But you had to know the thickness of the steak, and how done you wanted it, to know which light to watch to come on. That was the most confusing thing about this thing. If you wanted a steak medium well, the lights were only accurate on a 3/8 inch thick steak. If the steak was 1/2 inch you waited for the next light, then it was just right. Or if the steak was thicker than that, you had to wait for yet the next light.
There was no temperature adjusting knob on this machine.
After it broke, we never found another one like it, but did find one that used a temperature probe that worked quite well.
It didn't have the huge grease trap, so you had to set a saucer on the counter in front of it if doing more than a couple, and it was much smaller in size also, only about 8 x 8 inches, while our first one was more like 12 x 14 inches. And it cooked a lot faster too, hi hi.
As I mentioned earlier, the key to success is the internal temperature of the meat. I like the grill you describe with the row of lights that most likely was a timer. Unfortunately more information than the timing is needed for perfection. Thus the thickness of the steak is important. Some of the more recent gadgets I've looked at include a remote thermometer. Some are more remote than others. LOL The most popular ones are actually temperature sensors at the end of a length of cable. The probe goes into the meat and stays there until cooking is finished. The cable transmits the temperature information to a display, and in some cases to a computer; a smartphone for example. Thus you can watch your steak cook from some remote location. All steaks need to be turned at least once so that this setup isn't actually all that convenient, but it can be helpful determining the proper doneness of the meat. I've also seen some sensors that are wireless, and that is an amazing feat given how hot the grill can get.
The only issue I have with the probe stuck in the center of the steak for the entire period of cooking is that no steak I've ever measured cooks evenly. One end might be 20 degrees different than the other end due to the variation in muscle density. That is why I like a hand held thermometer. I can measure a few spots and average out the readings. Then, too, a 1" steak may not be uniformly cut and that will affect the way it's cooked as well. While all this is good to know, it's mostly useless information. A cook has to have instincts to compensate for all the variations in nature.
On the first salmon cooker I talked about. I think that one larger pin was a temperature sensor.
It was offset slightly so hit the thicker area of a salmon fillet.
The grill with all the lights on it, cooked from both the top and bottom plates in the device.
Some cuts of meat are not a uniform thickness, and the thickest part of the meat should go over one of the eight rings inside the unit. Maybe it was six rings, but those were apparently where the heating elements actually were.
That last cheaper one we had that did have a sensor probe with it, fed in from the side and was detachable.
The insulation on the wires to it must have been something, because it never burned or melted.
Working in a restaurant, we never had any of that stuff. When we had to cook meats, they were portion controlled, and had a specific time on each side at a pre-set temperature. Even so, at home with the Char-broiler, I just played it by ear, hi hi.
I've read about how things should be cooked to perfection, but obviously we don't live in a perfect world. It's good to know what the ideal is nonetheless. It takes a lot of experience to cook intuitively. Life in the restaurant business is way more structured and organized so that producing the perfect meal every time is just a matter of following a formula. Not so in the average home kitchen where there are way many more variables. Most meals do not need to be made by the recipe. There is often a lot of leeway a cook can take. That's where experience comes in handy. You got to know what you can get away with and still end up with something edible.
I love gadgets but most of them are just boy toys. A lot can be done with a simple skillet or soup pot. Not much more is needed on the cook top. Using the oven is a no brainer, but it does take a certain degree of good judgement to know when to microwave cook something. There is a difference, especially when it comes to left overs. LOL
Back when I was the chief cook and bottle washer for our family, I was quite good at tossing things together that everybody liked, and even if I started with the same basic ingredients, I added others that made each meal sorta unique.
Now, I would probably starve to death if I had to cook for myself, hi hi.
Debi is the one who is into gadgets and tries many of them. Thankfully her Sou Vide or whatever it's called was stored away.
One restaurant we used to eat at, the cook came and prepared your meal right at your table on a butane burner.
But naturally, everything was prepared before hand in the back, before he came rushing out to your table, hi hi.
There was another restaurant here we went to one time, Debi went more than once. You fix your own food at your table.
Which basically means, everything, including the meat, you boil yourself. Heck at the price they charge, I think they should cook it, hi hi.
There was a Japanese restaurant not too far from our old house. They did what you described above, i.e., prepare your meal at your table. I'm trying to recall the heat source. It might have been built into the center of the table or along one side. All I remember is the cook was also an entertainer. He would prepare the shrimp and flip it so that the discarded tail would end up in his shirt pocket, for example. There were a few other things they did to create interesting shapes and forms out of whatever it was they were cooking. And, of course, they juggled the knives and tools they used in between their other antics. It was a pretty good show and in a way justified the high price of the meal. The last time we went there I ordered sea scallops. They did the usual performance, but obviously the scallops were frozen prior to the chef's appearance at our table. They could not be prepared as scallops should be and their taste was off. That was the end of that story.
The other interesting restaurant we went to specialized in fondue cooking. You ordered pots of whatever you wanted to dip your chunks of food into for cooking. I seem to recall there were several versions of oil or cooking medium. Then there was the melted chocolate pot for desserts. I seem to recall that place was reasonably priced and kind of fun to eat at. But those fondue pots were hot and I suspect they had some very high insurance premiums to go along with other expenses. LOL
I've had a few meals at places where the chef was also an entertainer, but it was still American cuisine.
I can't remember the name of the place we ate where we cooked our own food.
I couldn't afford that place, we went as a guest of someone else who picked up the tab.
We had phun, but it is not something I cared to do again.
