Bar en Croûte inspired by Paul Bocuse
This branzino cooked
in a puff pastry is/was, along the red
mullet dressed in crusty potato scales (click here), the soup VGE (a
soup with black truffle and foie gras hidden under a puff pastry created in
1975 for the France’s President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing) and some (plenty of)
other ones, a signature dish of Paul Bocuse.
This dish, served in
l’Auberge de Collonges, the Paul Bocuse’s restaurant near Lyon, consists in a skinned
branzino stuffed with a scallop and freshwater fish mousse, and cooked in a
puff pastry replicating the shape of a fish. It is served with Sauce Choron, a
sauce made with shallots, wine, red wine vinegar, tarragon, eggs… similar to a
Sauce Béarnaise… This is now the traditional recipe of the Paul
Bocuse’s recipe… but I found recently on a French TV archive site the initial
recipe as proposed by Paul Bocuse himself in the mid-70’s. This recipe is
slightly different and a bit simpler too, since the stuffing is simply made of
cottage cheese (fromage blanc) and herbs, and the sauce is a beurre
blanc flavored with tarragon.
This
is the recipe I mostly followed here, with some twists and adaptations based on
the products I had available. For instance, as I didn’t have fresh tarragon, I
used fresh basil and celery leaves. Instead of fromage blanc, which,
according to Bocuse, is to bring moistness inside the fish, I used fresh ricotta
that did perfectly the job, and if my sauce base was a beurre blanc, I
also enrich it to integrate the fish trims (skin, bones) and the vegetables
cooking juice. Talking of the vegetables, I served my bar en croûte with
baby turnips, radishes and carrots cooked and glazed in butter and sparkling limonade.
Levels of difficulty
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Cost
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Preparation
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Resting
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Cooking
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n
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$$
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45 minutes*
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30 minutes
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40 minutes
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* I
used a commercial puff pastry
Ingredients 2 servings
§ 1 branzino of 1.5/2.0 lbs., gutted but non-scaled
(very important)
§ 2 puff pastry sheets
§ Fresh basil and celery leaves
§ Ricotta, in a sufficient quantity to stuff the
inside of the fish (or cottage cheese, crème fraîche…)
§ Olive oil
§ 1 egg yolk
§ Salt and pepper (or piment d’Espelette)
For the sauce:
§ 2 shallot cloves chopped
§ A glass of dry white wine (Burgundy for instance)
§ Olive oil
§ Herbs
§ A generous quantity of butter (~2 oz.)
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Instructions
§ First
thing to do, unless you ask your fishmonger to do it, is to skin the fish.
This is why it is important to have a non-scaled fish as it makes this
operation much, much easier than with a scaled fish. The thickness and the
resistance of the scale “shell” allow you to remove the skin easily. The technique
I use is to start from the belly near the head, and, with a sharp knife, to cut
and slide under the skin till it is loose up to the top of the fish back, and
to reiterate the operation on the other side, after which you just need to
pull out the skin from the top… as a surgical tape! Then, with the same knife,
also remove the bones and fins on the top of the fish, which will leave a groove
that just calls for being stuffed with herbs! Trim the fins and tail. Keep the fish skin
and wastes for your sauce,
§
Salt and pepper the fish,
outside and inside,
§ Make
a stuffing with the ricotta mixed with the herbs, salt, pepper and a tbsp. of
olive oil, and fill the fish belly and head with this stuffing. Also insert
some herbs in the top groove,
§
Rub the fish with olive oil
and herbs, and let it rest like that in the fridge for around half an hour,
§
Then, preheat your oven at
420 F
§
Prepare and roll the puff
pastry sheets in order to obtain two rectangles (bottom and top) large enough
to wrap the fish and draw fins and a tail (see pictures).
§
Place the bottom pastry sheet on
an oven plaque that you will have previously covered with a floured parchment
paper sheet. Place the fish on the pastry sheet and with a brush or your
finger, humidify the area around the fish for a better sealing, taking account
of the areas for the fins and tail that you will shape in the pastry. Cover the
fish with the top pastry sheet and adjust it so that it fits the fish shape
with as less air as possible. Press with your fingers and palm around the
fish and the anticipated fin and tail area, to have the top sheet adhere to
the bottom sheet.
§
With a knife, draw and/or cut
(depending on your manual skills, mine are poor) a shape around the fish and
the anticipated fin and tail area, and with the back of your knife, slightly
incise the border on 0.5 centimeter for a better sealing.
§
Use some pastry trims to make
a little ribbon that will separate the pastry fish head from the body, and
make an eye. With a small cookie cutter or the larger part of a pastry pipe,
draw scales on the pastry skin. Then, brush the whole with the yolk diluted with
a little bit of water and slightly salted.
§
Place the fish in the 420 F
preheated oven and set up the oven to
360 F for around 40 minutes or till your crust takes a nice golden
color.
§
Meanwhile, make a sauce with
the fish trims and chopped shallot heads seared in a little bit of olive oil,
deglaze with dry white wine and let evaporate the alcohol, then, add the
herbs and let reduce, add some water if need be, strain (remember: the fish
skin was not scaled!) and before serving, put back to boil and add soft butter
(at room temperature, it won’t work if the butter is too cold) while gently
stirring to emulsify your beurre blanc.
§
It is the ready to serve, here,
with vegetable roots cooked in butter and sweet limonade (ftr, I added the
concentrated cooking juice to the beurre blanc), part of the crust and the
sauce.
§
And little final tip, when you
have finished your plate, just take some leftover crust and dip it in the
sauce. Just divine!!!
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Gallery
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