This is loosely based on an Alinea dish that has something like 30 different components. The Alinea recipe combines flaky white sea bass with lentils, a variety of mushrooms, purees, and a red wine glaze. Compared to my not very successful butternut squash dish that had the benefit of a lot of planning, this dish came together naturally, quickly and was a lovely dinner. I basically had the white cod and some time on my hands. I remembered the Alinea dish and borrowed the idea of combining the fish with lentils and enoki from it. I also remembered a dish from Modernist Cuisine, based on an Eric Ripert recipe, that combines Escolar with beurre rouge (red wine butter sauce) and little rounds of fresh potato chips. Fancy fish and chips!
To prepare the french Puy lentils I cooked them till soft and then stirred in finely diced and sautéed vegetables and aromatics. I seasoned them with fresh thyme and some of my homemade red wine vinegar. They had a perfect bright flavor and a wonderful “pop”. The potato chips were so good the kids and I almost ate them all before I got a chance to even start plating. I first thinly sliced a russet potato on a mandolin and then used a small cookie cutter to stamp out perfect little rounds. I am supposed to only use these rounds in the dish and dispose of the other pieces where the rounds where cut from, but after frying them all up they just had a very neat look. So I decided to plate them along with the perfect little rounds. The potatoes really elevated the dish. They gave it a refined look and added a ton of texture and flavor.
Now, on to the “broken” red butter sauce. It’s not supposed to be broken of course, but I used it anyways. It was too late to make anymore and really it tasted and looked fine. Many a modern recipe, like those in the NOMA book, specifically go for this non-emulsified sauce look. I have tried to make this particular recipe for beurre rouge that uses xanthan gum from Modernist Cuisine three times now. The recipe has you make a reduction of red wine and aromatics, just like a traditional method. Then you whisk in xanthan and then the butter. The gum is supposed to make the sauce more stable and prevent it from breaking. Well, it breaks every damn time. I am not sure what the problem is, but I know that next time I will be making it the old-fashioned way. It might be more temperamental, but it has never broken on me.
I cooked the fish sous vide after bagging the fillets with a few knobs of butter. For Diana, as usual, I quickly seared the fish right before serving. She loves a bit of color on her fish fillets. For me, I did not sear it. I much prefer the pure white and perfectly cooked fish. For the Enoki mushrooms, I made a butter bath (that just sounds nice) in a small sauce pan and gently poached them in there. I seasoned them with salt right before plating. Last component was the asparagus. I quickly blanched the spears in boiling water and then dropped them in ice water. I only wanted to use the tips, so I cut them off and warmed them in the same beurre monte that I used to poach the mushrooms.
