Jazz Bistro Salmon-en-croute

For a short while we lived in one the most charming cities in the world - San Francisco (well, Alp lived there longer but together only for 6 months). And Jazz Bistro on Ellis Street was our second home. This place is timeless for us with its live jazz music every night, the most tempting chocolate croissants and fresh black coffees early in the mornings, its traditional French food and above all having a good chat with our cousins at the back office and family dinners at the dinner area just before it gets crowded.

So last night we decided to cook one of the classic dishes at Les Joulins Jazz Bistro – ‘salmon-en-croute’ for our friends who came to Dubai for a few days from Istanbul. For this we went through couple of recipes and decided to go ahead with Gordon Ramsay’s. This experimental dish (for us) is actually described in Gordon’s video (in the website) very clearly from a to z, it is really hard to go wrong.

de-skinning here

We first started with de-skinning the salmon (of course this could be asked in the supermarket where we bought the fish!). Thanks to one of Gordon’s video, this wasn’t as difficult as it seemed. The trick is to hold the skin and with a very sharp knife cut deep into the skin (not into the fish). Otherwise most of the salmon is wasted.

dill-basil-thyme-lemon butter

pasting the butter to one of the fillets, the other one gets the mustard

salmon sandwich

We prepared the mixture to be pasted to the salmon with roughly chopped fresh dill, basil and thyme which are then mixed with softened butter and lemon zest. This paste was applied to one of the salmon fillets. For the other fillet we applied grainy mustard and these two fillets were combined like a sandwich.

salmon in the pastry

The short-crust pastry we bought from the frozen section of the supermarket needed to be thawed for 1.5 hours at room temperature. And we put our salmon sandwich in the middle of the pastry. We applied 1 beaten egg to the sides of the pastry around the salmon and seasoned it with salt and pepper. We closed the pastry, did another egg wash on top of the pastry and put it in the oven which was preheated at 200 degrees.

boiled potatoes with herbs

broccoli with garlic and chili

While the fish is in the oven, we prepared the side dishes: boiled new potatoes with drizzle of olive oil and chopped fresh dill, basil and thyme; and broccoli which are first boiled for a few minutes then stir-fried with olive oil, crushed garlic and red chili pepper for another few minutes.

just out from the oven

le salmon en croute

The fish was cooked in about 20-25 minutes and that’s when the pastry became golden. It looked beautiful (but not as fish shape as in Jazz Bistro!) and all of us really found it delicious, we decided to include this classic Jazz Bistro dish to our guest menu..

Jazz Bistro San Francisco

Gordon Ramsay's 'salmon en croute'