Quick experiment

So I bought a fillet of salmon at Kroger last week, and it was pre-portioned into 4 pieces, so I thought, "why not fuck around with some of this?"

So I did. I kept two pieces (the larger pieces in the foreground) and stuck them back in the fridge for a real dinner/lunch tomorrow, and used the smaller pieces for a poaching experiment. I've never poached fish before, but I saw a video about it a couple weeks ago and thought, "Yeah, that's simple enough to do, right?" Turns out: poaching fish is easy as fuck.

I seasoned the fish up with some salt and pepper to keep things simple and consistent between the two pieces. The video I saw talked about cream being the traditional poaching liquid, but also mentioned butter as an option, so I decided I'd try poaching one piece in cream and the other in butter so I could compare the two.

If you're unfamiliar with poaching, it's essentially the same as boiling or simmering something, except not at a high enough temperature to simmer or boil. Unfortunately, I didn't have quite enough cream to fully submerge my salmon, so I added a little olive oil to raise the level and still had to flip it a few times and keep basting it throughout. So maybe it's not a pure poach, but fuck it.

The second piece was done in butter with a little bit of olive oil to help get the liquid level up. I made sure not to completely submerge it and followed the same procedure as with the cream: I added a little olive oil, flipped it a bit, and basted a bit. Still simple enough.

All that was left to do was taste that shit. The one on the left is the cream; the one on the right was the butter. Both of them were cooked well, both tasted fine, but I definitely preferred the butter. I liked the flavor better because it tasted like butter, but the cream one had a little bit less of a fishy taste. Also, the cream one was a bit drier in texture, which is a definite strike for me.

At the very least, I was happy to see that the fish was cooked very evenly on both methods. I'll probably be doing some more poaching in the future to try out some other ideas. Feel free to email me if you have any suggestions!

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