Halibut Poached in Red Wine
With a side of bourguignon garnish, rule-breaking, and golden tomahawks.
Welcome to another issue of Le Cordon Bong, a newsletter about recreating Michelin star meals at home. You can get in touch with me via the comments or by email. All of the previous content is up on the website (which I personally find to be a a more enjoyable reading experience than the email format).
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Week 8, vol. 1
Setting the Table
Just two weeks left to go with the Hand & Flowers cookbook before we move on to Rogan. Another “easy” dish this week before gearing up for a spectacular finish with two of the craziest dishes I’ve ever seen, one of which involves me procuring an entire pig’s head. So, watch this space.
If you’ve been here before, skip ahead! For the benefit of first-time readers, write-ups are structured thusly: (1) Amuse-Bouche - the history and provenance of the dish; (2) Starters - an intro to the fancy Michelin version of the dish I’ll be cooking; (3) Main Courses - the actual cooking process; (4) Desserts - thoughts and conclusions on what worked, what didn’t, and most importantly, what tasted good; (5) Petit Fours - footnotes and references.
Amuse-Bouche
This dish should probably just be called halibut à la bourguignonne1 , which is the French term for dishes cooked with red wine and garnished with small onions, mushrooms, and bacon - most famously of course, in the form of boeuf bourguignon.
“But fish is supposed to go with white wine!”, I hear you protest indignantly. Well, the combination of red wine and fish appears to break a lot of traditional rules, but according to Larousse2, it is A Thing (and we do not question Larousse’s authority in this house).
Upon further research, it’s actually a not-so-uncommon preparation with monkfish (lotte à la bourguignonne), and there’s even a 19th century recipe (in Antonin Carême’s L’art de la Cuisine Française au XIVᵉ Siècle) to make it with eels and crayfish, which sounds utterly delightful.
Because nothing in French cuisine is ever content with being simple and logical, ‘à la bourguignonne’ has a second, completely different meaning when applied to escargots à la bourguignonne. In this case, it refers to the preparation with garlic butter, which is also known as beurre à la bourguignonne.
Starters
Unlike last week’s debacle, I had the foresight to actually read the recipe before making it this time.
This was one of the earliest dishes on the Hand & Flowers menu, when the kitchen team consisted on just three chefs who had to figure out how to cook 50 covers of Michelin level food between them. It’s therefore designed for quick service (music to my ears).
The dish involves poaching the fish in a red wine reduction, which Kerridge describes as “the most expensive dish in the world” because of the 10 bottles of (pretty decent) wine that were used up every service. (Presumably, this was prior to the creation of the monstrosity that is the $1,000 golden tomahawk steak at Nusr-Et).
Kerridge goes on to say, “if we did it now, of course, we would vacuum-seal the fish in a bag with the reduction and save on a lot of red wine! Now that we’ve revisited it for this book, I think we’ll get it back on the menu: but in version 2.0”, and then… doesn’t give us the vacuum-sealed recipe. What a tease.
I suppose that means I’ll be temporarily taking up the post of Hand & Flowers development chef this week when I cook this again for the adaptation, because I generally prefer to drink my wine, rather than poach stuff in it.
Main Courses
Braised bacon
The first thing I had to do was braise a slab of uncut streaky bacon for 12 hours in a sous vide water bath at 72°C, compress it, slice into lardons, and fry until crisp.
Which uh, no. I’m not buying a slab of bacon and cooking it for half a day, only to use about 20 grams of it as a garnish. A garnish! Like, I’m all for unnecessarily elaborate cooking (I have a whole newsletter about it, in case you haven’t heard) but even I have my limits.
Halibut à la bourguignonne
So, onwards to the rest of the recipe.
It’s always a good sign when the recipe is so simple that I can mise3 everything on my tiny kitchen trolley counter.
This was just an easy, linear cook. I very reluctantly boiled down an entire bottle of red wine, and while that was going on, steamed the baby shallots, fried the bacon, wilted the spinach, and made the red wine sauce.
To finish, it was a straightforward task of pan frying the mushrooms (oyster, girolle, shiitake, and white shimeji), very carefully poaching the fish for 8 minutes, throwing it all together in a plate, and… that’s it! Kerridge really wasn’t exaggerating when he said this dish was designed for quick service.
Pomme purée
I decided to humour Tom by making his pomme purée recipe instead of my usual go-to recipe by Joël Robuchon. Yeah, Joël’s is still the best - it’s faster (boiling instead of baking the potatoes), uses fewer ingredients (no double cream), and I just prefer the taste of La Ratte potatoes in mash (they’re so smooth).
Desserts
That was hands down the easiest cook from the book so far. The fiddliest thing was peeling a few baby shallots, and I’d very happily make this again (if only it wasn’t so darn expensive).
My tasting notes:
Visually, it’s stunning. It’s just so unusual to see fish with red wine. The colour contrast of the purple glaze against the meaty white fish almost looked like the cross-section of a giant octopus tentacle.
Great fish should just be poached. I used to think poached fish was boring and flavourless (the “poached” salmon served at my school dinners comes to mind4), but done correctly, it’s really one of the best preparations for meaty, juicy fish like halibut. The texture was sheer perfection with every bite, and the gentle poaching preserves all the natural sweetness of the fish.
Bacon doesn’t need to be cooked for 12 hours. It will still taste good. Because duh, it’s bacon.
So, another successful cook! Although I have to say, sous vide just seems like a no-brainer for this. I was nervously checking the red wine poaching temperature every 10 seconds to make sure I didn’t overcook the fish - had I used the sous vide instead, I could have spent those 8 minutes relaxing and sipping the leftover wine that I didn’t have to boil away. So, I think it’s pretty clear which direction my adaptation will be going in. Until then, happy cooking!
Petit Fours (aka the footnotes)
Or flétan (French for halibut) à la bourguignonne if we’re being pedantic.
Larousse is the definitive encyclopedia of French cuisine, first envisioned by the great French chef Prosper Montagné, and published by Éditions Larousse in 1938. The second edition was updated in 2001 by a gastronomic committee chaired by the legend himself, Joël Robuchon. It’s easily my most-used reference book, and a must-have (or great gift idea!) for any serious home cook.
Short for ‘mise en place’, a French culinary phrase for having all the ingredients arranged and organised. Always good to do, but often quite difficult in my tiny kitchen.
I say “poached”, although a more accurate description would be “boiled to a mush, until it no longer resembles food fit for human consumption”.