Italians seem to possess an amazingly strong passion for food, much more so than the rest of the world.
There is a really great site, Italian Food Net, which serves up delicious authentic Italian recipe videos. Their chefs speak Italian in the clips, but they have done such a wonderful job with the subtitles and ingredient conversions that the recipes are simple to follow.
Some recipes are incredibly simple to make but somehow give the impression that you’ve spent hours slaving over them. This would be one of those! In the video, chef Alessandro prepares an Italian salmon carpaccio with oranges served over arugula. Head over to their site to view the written recipe, browse around a bit and pretend you’re a student in an Italian culinary school!
Tiny bites of ingredient education:
Carpaccio is defined as an appetizer using thinly sliced raw fish or meat.
The peppercorns used in the recipe are brined, Whole Foods should have them, you may need to look in the area where jarred pickles are.
The recipe calls for the greens “rocket”, and rocket = arugula!
Chef Niall Harbison. Everything he stands for is delicious. Never pretentious, he loves food, radiates contagious enthusiasm, and his dishes are restaurant quality, yet easy to follow. He started off with Ifoods.tv, which has now transformed beautifully into Look and Taste, a visual fiesta for food lovers with recipes, a video glossary for food terms, and a chef’s blog documenting his culinary musings.
Our chef recipe video on this beautiful early spring weekend would be the perfect breakfast in bed, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon. Share the love!
*Editing to add: Chef Niall has moved on with SimplyZesty.com and we apologize, his video is no longer available. However this recipe needs to live on, it is so amazingly good.
Recipe instructions as adapted from the video:
Scrambled Eggs With Smoked Salmon
Chef Niall Harbison
Ingredients:
Eggs (3 eggs per person)
Smoked Salmon
Bread Slices (thick, from a freshly sliced baguette)
Cream
Butter
Chives
Slice smoked salmon into strips, and finely chop chives. Melt butter and cream over medium heat. Grill or toast the bread. Use 3 eggs per person, beat in a bowl, and add to the butter and cream in the pan. Blend with a spatula for 1-2 minutes, making sure not to overcook, moving the spatula constantly. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and place the eggs over the toasted bread. Place the salmon on top of the egg toast, and top with a generous amount of chives.
Jacques Pépin is truly one of our favorite chefs of all time. Author of 25 cookbooks and host of over 300 cooking shows on public television, his elegant recipes and detailed instructions command a deep level of respect from both home cooks and culinary experts throughout the world.
In this video from Food & Wine magazine, Jacques and his daughter Claudine prepare a 10 minute recipe of cured salmon gravlax pizza, a quick and delicious appetizer that would bring holiday cheer to your Christmas party with minimal effort!
What is gravlax you ask? Scandinavian in origin, gravlax literally translates to “salmon dug into the ground”. In the middle ages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Estonian fisherman had a special technique to cure their freshly caught salmon. They salted it and fermented it (to preserve the fish) by burying it into the sand for several days. Modern preparation of gravlax is much simpler, thinly sliced salmon is simply cured with a dry rub of salt, sugar, and often dill.
Jacques Pépin’s recipe for salmon gravlax pizza calls for the following ingredients: thinly sliced raw salmon, kosher salt, pepper, brown sugar, sour cream, horseradish, a cooked thin pizza crust (you may use a frozen pizza dough to prepare this), thinly sliced red onion, black olives, capers, and basil.
Salmon Gravlax Pizza
Chef Jacques Pepin
For the gravlax:
½ pound skinless boneless salmon fillet
1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt
1 ½ teaspoons light brown sugar
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
A little oil
For the pizza:
1 flour tortilla
Olive oil
¼ cup sour cream
1 tablespoon horseradish, homemade or store-bought
¼ cup red onion, sliced very thin
6 black oil-cured olives, pitted and cut into pieces
7 or 8 fresh basil leaves
Fleur de sel, for garnish
Directions
For the gravlax, cut the salmon into 8 thin slices, and arrange them in a single layer on a flat plate or platter. Mix together the kosher salt, light brown sugar, and freshly ground black pepper. Sprinkle half of this mixture evenly over the salmon slices, turn the slices over, and sprinkle with the remaining seasoning mixture. Spread a thin coating of oil on the slices, just enough to make the salmon shiny, and press a piece of plastic wrap directly on top of the salmon. Refrigerate to cure; it will be ready in an hour or less, although you can leave it overnight or even up to a day. (We are using only 4 slices of gravlax on our pizza. Make a second pizza, or enjoy the leftover gravlax with cucumber and/or sliced onion and buttered black bread.)
Preheat the oven to 500°F. Precook the tortilla for this pizza. Coat the tortilla with olive oil, using about ½ teaspoon on each side. Place the oiled tortilla on a cookie sheet and, to prevent it from curling up and bubbling in the oven without the weight of toppings to hold it down, place a rack or cake stand upside down directly on top of the tortilla. The rack will hold it flat as it cooks. Bake for about 5 minutes to brown the tortilla nicely and make it crisp. Let cool before continuing.
When the tortilla is cool, coat with the sour cream, and then spread on the horseradish. (My friend Claude has enormous and pungent horseradish in his garden that he peels, grates, and puts in a jar with a little vinegar, salt, and water.) Arrange 4 slices of gravlax on top, so the salmon covers most of the surface, although it’s attractive if a little sour cream shows through here and there. Sprinkle the sliced red onion on top, and then scatter the olives over the surface. Finally, coarsely tear the basil leaves into pieces, and top the pizza with the basil. Cut the pizza into 8 pieces. Sprinkle with fleur de sel.
Chef Becky Troelstra of Sliced Tomatoes in Vancouver, prepares an wild salmon from British Columbia with a cranberry compote. A compote is simply fresh or dried fruit simmered with sugar to a syrupy consistency. Becky pairs the entree with roasted acorn squash and a fresh garden salad, and the end result is a very healthy and warm autumn meal.
Ingredients:
For the squash, acorn squash, diced onion, diced garlic, olive oil, coarse salt, pepper
For the entree, wild sockeye salmon,half of a sliced orange, the juice and zest of the rest of the orange, white wine, cloves, a bayleaf
For the compote: dried cranberries, brown sugar, orange juice
For the salad, organic spring greens, toasted almonds, tomato, cucumber
For the dressing, apple cider vinegar, olive oil, dijon, salt, pepper
Executive Chef Ray Hayes from McCormick & Schmick’s restaurant in Burbank, Ca, prepares salmon with red delicious apples, smoked bacon, and vidalia onions.
