Recipe: Philly Cedar Smoked Salmon Steak w/ A marinated Shitake Mushroom and Micro Green Salad.

So the title of this piece is the Ulysses of food blog titles, but if you hve the time and fortitude to get through this title you will be rewarded by this dish. It’s one of my favorites and it’s much simpler than the title.

The Salmon: What you will need is Salmon Steaks, I will not go into the importance of buying wild salmon in another blog post but suffice it to say, wild salmon, tastes better, it cooks better and it’s much better for you.

Salmon Steaks

Salt

Pepper

Cream Cheese

Fresh Rosemary

1 Lemon

bread crumbs

One soaked cedar plank(I soak for 24 hours, because I find high heat works better for cedar smoking.)

How to: Take the cream cheese and stir in the fresh rosemary and bread crumbs*. As you are mixing zest the lemon into the mixture. Take the cream cheese filling and stuff the salmon steak better the two dorsal horns of the cut. Then take butcher’s twine and tie the entire cut together circumference wise. You want the cream cheese filling to be packed in very tight. This also keeps the salmon steak compressed which will help this normally thick cut cook much more evenly. You then put the fish on your cedar plank which should be still damp, and to the grill you go. Normally salmon steaks take about 45 minutes to cook on the plank, but it’s really about letting the technique take it’s time and really set that smokey flavour and caramelization of the outside of the meat. If the fish seems to be drying out placing some slices of that lemon I mentioned earlier can help. I personally like to grill some sliced lemon as a garnish.

The Salad:

Shitake Mushrooms

Sherry Vinagar

Soy sauce

Salt

Whole black peppercorns

Dill

Micro Arugula

How to: Submerge the mushrooms in boiling water for about 15 minutes. Strain the mushrooms over a container and keep the reserve liquid for later. Then take the mushrooms in a sauce pan adding the salt, pepper corns, and dill to the sherry vinegar and soy sauce. Reduce the mixture and de-glaze your pan with the reserve liquid which you saved from earlier. Simmer and reduce by half. Then take the mixture and refrigerate. Serve the mushrooms on a bed of micro arugula.

This entire dish is my play on two sushi dishes. The Philadelphia Roll and The Shitake Roll. As a whole the fish component of the dish is quite rich. I like pairing it with the salad because there is great acidity which kind of cuts the richness. On the plate the dish looks pretty austere, the stuffed fish and the small salad can be pretty stark and minimalist once again bringing back the aesthetic of sushi.**

*Bread Crumbs are the secret to this dish. They bind your filling together, oherwise the heat would cause the cheese to melt and run all over your cedar plank. They also get a nice crust on the filling after some of that salmon oil begins to ooze out of the fish.

**I am going to eventually have photos of all these dishes but this one I have not made in about a year. But as soon as I get some photos they will be posted.