Salmon Poached in Butter

Most salmon is cooked with high heat. Ours spends nearly twenty minutes resting in warm grass-fed butter.

The fish that emerges is something different from what most people expect. The flesh holds together but gives way under a fork. The colour stays deep. The butter does not make it rich so much as round, the way a little fat carries flavour further.

I learned to respect gentle heat as a saucier, where a sauce pushed too hard breaks and cannot be brought back. Fish is the same. It tells you very quickly when you have rushed it.

We use wild Alaskan salmon, sourced through our fishmongers in Edmonton. The butter is grass-fed, and after poaching it carries the flavour of the fish, becoming the base for staff meals, vegetables, or sauces rather than going to waste.

The salmon is one part of our Friday Seafood Platter, alongside cod wrapped in pancetta, monkfish and shrimp roulade, and prawn croquettes.