Kitchen Zink - A New Addition

We welcomed a new addition to our little family yesterday!  She’s 10” long, and weighs 2 lb. 10 oz.  Oh, and she’s a lovely shiny silver color.  And that 10” is more of a diameter than a length.  And there’s a long handle sticking out of one end.  And “she” isn’t so much a she as an it.  Wanna see a picture?  Here ya go!

Beautiful, isn’t it?  That’s a 10” stainless steel All-Clad fry pan, just purchased from Williams-Sonoma for the low, low price of… well, okay it wasn’t low at all, but hey it’s a pretty pan, isn’t it?  We went with the pan out of the d5 line, which is supposedly super schmancy, with 5 alternating layers of metal making up the thickness of the pan.  It goes stainless steel, aluminum, stainless steel, aluminum, stainless steel, which apparently gives you really quick and even heat distribution.  If you believe the website, they have real artisan-style panmakers who forge their cookware, and it’s all made in the USA.

Now, you may be thinking, “but Greg, you already have pans.  I know, I’ve seen them in that one other post that had pictures.”  This is true.  We have many pans, and they are actually really nice too (Calphalon Contemporary, in case you really want to emulate me).  But the one difference is on the inside.  All our Calphalon pans have nonstick coatings on the interior, which is great for a lot of foods.  But as I was reading Fine Cooking the other day, I stumbled upon an article on pan-searing.  Searing is a really fun cooking style, and it’s a pretty basic one that you better master if you want to call yourself a cook.  The article said you can’t get the same quality sear in a non-stick pan as you can in a regular stainless steel one.  That set the wheels turning.

The accompanying recipe to that article, Sear-roasted salmon with lemon-butter sauce, sounded awesome, and we hadn’t yet had any fish this week, and we had salmon in the freezer, and besides I really really wanted that pan, so I decided to go for it.  I hemmed and hawed a bit between the d5 and the LTD2, which has an anodized aluminum exterior but is otherwise the same.  I was pretty sure the heat transfer would be different somehow, but I was pretty sure d5 was the top of the line and only a few bucks more, so I chose that one.  Added bonus, it’s much prettier!

After sufficient time marveling over the beauty of the pan, it was time to give it a try!  The salmon recipe was pretty simple, another variation on the sear, roast, make pan-sauce theme that is so handy.  Step one was to heat the pan up, add a little olive oil, plunk in the salmon pieces and leave them alone for two minutes.  That was a bit tricky, since I tend to always feel the need to be stirring, poking or flipping as I cook, but I managed to hold myself in check and not disturb the darn fish.  After two minutes, they had seared enough that they didn’t stick when I flipped them over.  Then another one minute on that side, and into the oven they went.

Our pieces of salmon were small, so they didn’t need much time in the oven.  Following the recipe, we kept to the low side and did 4 minutes at 425.  Then the fish got to rest while we made the sauce, in the same pan, on the stovetop.  Note that the pan, including the handle, is really hot when it comes out of a 425 degree oven!  I have been burned by this (literally!) on more than one occasion, so now I use on oven mitt to grab the pan, naturally, but also drape a hot pad over the handle as a reminder immediately once it comes out of the oven.  Trust me, you don’t want to reflexively grab onto that handle when it’s that hot.

For the sauce, we used some green onion as a substitute for shallots, cooked with a bit of fresh rosemary in ¾ cup of dry white wine.  Here’s where you get to scrape up any of the browned bits from the cooking of the fish, and work them into the sauce.  Just like the pros!  Once the wine had almost all reduced, we whisked in about 5 Tbsp of butter until the sauce was nice and thick, added a splash of fresh-squeezed lemon juice, and the dish was done.  Served with a little brown rice and some local spinach, wilted in olive oil.  Sounds like a meal!

A really tasty meal, too.  Criticisms first, I think the outsides weren’t seared enough.  I was a bit too chicken to really crank the heat on my brand-new pan, especially since All-Clad warns you not to.  But that’s just so the pan doesn’t discolor; it doesn’t actually harm it, and I should have known that we needed some righteous heat to get a nice sear.  Secondly, these were rather small pieces, and I think even that 4 minutes was a bit too long in the oven.  They weren’t dry, but they could have been pulled a few minutes earlier and they would have been a bit tastier.

On the plus side, the salmon was tasty, and the sauce was fabulous.  I had a meuniere sauce over Halibut at one of the restaurants we visited in DC, and it was one of the best fish dishes I’ve ever had.  This one wasn’t marketed as a meuniere per se, but it was comprised of lemon and butter, so it was close anyway.  We’ve tried making these sauces before, but this one was hands-down the best attempt yet.  Not sure if it was those browned bits in the sauce, or that we’re just getting better, but it was crisp and fresh from the lemon yet retained velvety smoothness from the butter.  It was so good, we just had to pour it over our rice too, so we could get a little more of that flavor.  :)

Not to be too boastful, but I honestly think once we perfect the cook time for the size of fillets, this is on par with a dish you’d get at a fancy sit-down restaurant.  Not too shabby for the first outing with the new member of the “family.”  I guess we should keep her.