Oh. My. God. Okay, so I was browsing for salmon recipes or things to do with salmon, and I came across a pinterest recipe of the salmon and siracha cream sauce. It looked stunning (as they always do) and ...mine does not look as stunning but it tastes AMAZING. It is lovely and you really cannot go wrong. I know the ingredients list is a little daunting, but most of it is simply 'put it all in a pot'. Super straight forward.
Ingredients:
For the Teriyaki Marinade
3 salmon fillets (I used atlantic salmon, with the skin on, because it was $5 cheaper than the skin -off- fillets)
1 Tablespoon cornstarch (or cornflour)
1/4 cup of soy sauce
1/4 cup of brown sugar (I used raw)
1/2 teaspoon of minced ginger
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon of minced garlic (Garlic is gooooood)
2 Tablespoons of honey.
For the Siracha Cream Sauce
1/2 cup of mayonaise
1 1/2 Tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
2-3 Tablespoons of siracha sauce.
For the Fried Rice
1 cup of rice (medium grain is pretty all purpose)
2 eggs
1/4 cup of milk
1/2 teaspoon of worchestershire sauce
Little bit of black pepper. Not much!
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 cup of diced bacon (cut out as much of the unnecessary fat as you can, that is, the fat with no meat in it!)
1/2 cup of frozen corn kernels
1/3 cup of finely diced cabbage.
1-2 teaspoons of powdered chicken stock
Method
First things first. If your salmon is frozen, take it out of the freezer the night before and defrost it in your fridge. Defrosting seafood slowly is a good idea, as it is a temperamental beast and if it can go bad, it will go bad and then you will be good friends with your toilet.
For the Teriyaki Marinade:
In a medium saucepan put the minced garlic and ginger. Warm them up and cook lightly until you can smell them. Add the soy sauce, sugar, honey, and garlic powder. Add in a cup of water, and stir thoroughly to mix all the stuff together, and bring it to simmer.
Simmering is when the liquid is gently almost boiling, like there's a little bit of bubbling around the outer edge. Low heat produces a low simmering boil thing.
Put the cornflour into a small glass (one with a flat bottom, no curls or loops or stupid silly parts that the flour can hide in) with 1/4 cup of water (or there abouts). Mix with a teaspoon until all the cornflour (starch) is mixed in with the water.
Put this slurry mixture into the simmering marinade. Add a teensy bit more water to the glass, swirl it around to get the last of the flour.
Don't turn up the heat. If it boils it won't thicken properly. Boiling is bad at this point. (Not massively bad just y'know, it won't be properly thick).
Stir the mixture until it thickens. It's thick enough when if you put in a metal spoon, and lift it up, you can see it obviously on the back of the spoon. Basically you want it 'viscous', it's still a sauce but it's a sticky sauce that sticks to everything and takes forever to wash off.
Let it cool to room temperature. You'll know you did the cooking right if when you tap the surface of the sauce with your finger to test if it's cool enough, you almost pull half of the sauce out of the pot with the up-lift before it drops back down. It's pretty cool.
If you have a giant ziplock bag, put your fish in this and add the marinade. Leave it to marinade for a minimum of 30 minutes, but a couple hours or overnight is ideal. So if you're eating this for dinner at say, 6, start prepping and cooking at around 2 or 3, if you can. Once the fish is in the marinade everythings peachy.
If you don't have a ziplock bag, and enjoy doing the dishes, put your fish and marinade into a bowl and put it in the fridge. Stir them occasionally and just make sure they are evenly and completely covered. Alternateively, if you hate the dishes, line the bowl with clingfilm, and do the same thing.
For the Siracha Cream Sauce:
Put everything in a bowl. Mix until it's nice and smooth and creamy. Be careful, however, the siracha sauce is quite spicy, and if you do this step early so it's out of the way, it will 'cook' in the fridge and heat up quite a bit.
For the Fried Rice:
Put the rice into a pot. You're not cooking it yet! You're washing it. Put cold water on the rice, and play with it. Run your fingers through the water, swirl it around, and drain it out. The water will be milky and opaque and white. Repeat two or three times until the water runs 9/10ths clean.
You're washing away the starch. This means your fried rice will be nice and dry and crumbly, like it's supposed to be, and not thick and gloopy with rice sticking to itself.
The general rule for rice cooking is for every 1/3rd cup of raw, dry rice, have 1 cup of water. The way the asians do it (or at least, a Thai lady taught me this way) is you even out the amount of rice across the bottom of the pot (or rice cooker if you have one!) and then put enough water in so that the depth of water over the rice is halfway between the tip of your finger and your first knuckle. Basically a little bit over your fingernail bed. That produces absolutely wonderful rice. Add to the water 1-2 teaspoons of powdered chicken stock.
I dislike plain rice, so I season it. Now, cook your rice, for roughly 12 minutes (stirring if in a pot, ignoring in a rice cooker) or until tender (and the water is all gone).
This is very important.
DON'T FORGET ABOUT YOUR RICE.
Seriously. Don't burn the bottom of your rice. Burnt rice is terrible.
If you DO burn your rice, take it immediately off the heat, and use a spoon to gently scrape off the topmost layer of white fluffy rice. Keep doing this until you hit rice that is a little more firmly stuck to the bottom of the pot.
The rice you have just separated is edible and good. The rest of it? Not so much.
Put water in your burnt rice-pot, using the same spoon scrape it off of the bottom. Strain out the water, throw away the bad rice (or put it in your chook bucket like I did. Ahem) and refill the pot with water. You are really going to want to leave this baby to soak.
Leave the good rice to cool while you're headdesking at having burnt your rice.
For the Cooking!
Whoo! We're finished with the prep of stuff!
Preheat the oven to ~200 degrees celcius. Alfoil a baking tray (be generous, and you will love me later for telling you to do this step), spray with non-stick spray.
Put the salmon in the pan (skin side down if you got the skin on type because it's cheaper), and spoon over the marinade. Try to make it evenly distributed over all three fillets, and around them too. Put the tray in the oven for 20-30 minutes. Or "until the fish flakes under the pressure of a fork". Let me tell you. This marinade? It is fish GLUE. It will not flake, or if it does flake you're not sure if it's actual flaking or you just broke off a bit of fish from sheer determination. Basically, you want the marinade to have reduced in the pan and lightly caramelised around the fish. If there is still juice in your marinade (and quite a bit of it) your fish isn't fully cooked. And there is usually a whopping ten minute window between 'juicy' and 'done'.
Okay. Now the fish is in the oven, you've set the timer, you're sweet to focus on the fried rice.
Two eggs into a bowl, add pepper, worchestershire sauce and the milk. Whisk that baby with a fork. Whisk it good.
Skillet frying pan on the heat, non-stick spray on the pan. Wait until the non-stick spray is 'invisible', then pour your omelette mix in. (I didn't add salt because there'll already be a lot of salt in the meal).
Cooking cooking cooking. Your omelette should look a little 'bubbly', when one side is done. If you're unsure, just carefully attempt to leaver up one edge of your omelette. If it's golden brown you're sweet to flip it over. It'll take about oh... another 20-30 seconds to seal the other side of the omelette, you want the middle to still be nice and light and fluffy.
While your omelette's first side is cooking, take out the bacon, and dice it up. Omelette out of the pan onto the cutting board. Bacon off the cuttingboard and into the pan. Pan back on the heat. Stir the bacon so it's spread out over the skillet.
Cut up the omelette and put it into the same bowl as your (not burnt!) rice. Mmmn! Nice omelette.
Stir the bacon.
Slice and dice and finely chop the cabbage. Toss the cabbage in with the bacon. Put a handful and a half (or a little more!) corn into a small pot. Fill with water. Bring to boil on medium-low heat. Stir the bacon again. It's taking it's sweet ass time to cook.
Strain the corn, put the corn into the bowl with the rice and omelette. Mnn! It's still a really nice omelette.
Get impatient with the bacon and turn the heat up a little. Stir it some more. Check the salmon. It's been around 20 minutes. You're not sure if it's done so you just go 'what the hell' and put it in for another 10 minutes.
Stir the bacon.
Decide the bacon is done, put the bacon in with the fried rice. Stir it through in the bowl, and tip the whole lot back into the pan, put the pan back onto the heat with a 1/4 cup of soy sauce. Stir it through until all your fluffy white rice is slightly brown. (I think that's why it's called 'dirty' fried rice).
Stirring stirring stirring. Oh! The salmon's ready. Turn off the heat to the oven, crack the door. Return to the fried rice, test the temperature to make sure everything is warmed through.
Portion out the fried rice onto the three plates. Three delicious mounds of delicious fried rice. Mmm. Try to make it roughly even in proportions of everything.
Take the pan and the salmon out of the oven. Using a soft plastic eggflip, caaarefully lift the salmon fillets up and out of the pan. If you do it juuuuust right you can leave the salmon skin on the bottom of the pan.
You didn't really want to eat the skin anyway, right?
Position your masterpiece of salmon over your bed of delicious rice, and you can either give each salmon fillet a smear of the siracha cream sauce yourself, or let others add it to their taste. And tada!
On their own, each of the 'salmon' elements seem to be 'too much'. The marinade is 'too sweet' and the cream sauce is 'too spicy'. But you put them together, and dear heaven it is divine. The sweetness in the marinade cuts through the burn in the cream, and if the heat buildup gets to be too much for you, a forkful of the fried rice and you're ready for the next six or seven mouthfuls. It is deceptive, it doesn't appear to be that much of a meal, but it is very nicely filling. And satisfying.
Though. In regards to what to do with the rest of the sweetened condensed milk tin? You're on your own!
Deliciousness definitely delivered!
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