Daring Cooks Challenge Dec'09: Salmon En Croute

I am not a member of daring kitchen yet, but hopefully soon will be. Anyway bumped into so many blogs lately cooking this lovely dish. I followed a recipe for ingredients from Good Food and techniques described by Gordon. So basically my variation is made of two layers of salmon as per Gordon but with spinach-cream cheese stuffing, like in original recipe on BBC Food website.

Ingredients:

150 g. of cream cheese

130 g. of baby spinach and basil

500 g. of salmon filet

1 sheet of short crust pastry

1 egg for brushing pastry

salt\pepper

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 200 C.

2. Prepare a baking trey: butter it and dust with a pinch of flour.

3. Grind baby spinach, basil and cream cheese into paste using mixer.

4. Cut salmon fillet in two halves, along the spine (so the salmon will be separated into back side and slimmer belly side). Dry salmon with paper towel. Spread spinach mixture on top of one side and cover it with another.

5. On slightly dusted with flour table, roll out pastry sheet. Place prepared stuffed salmon in the middle and fold it into the envelope, like on the Ramsay's video (link above), do not forget to brush the ends with egg, so they will become sticky.

6. Place salmon on baking trey folded side down. Make three holes with a knife on top, brush with beaten eggs, season top of the pastry with freshly ground salt and pepper.

7. Bake for 30 minutes, until crust will become nicely golden.

In my opinion, two layers of salmon is too much and with only one layer like in recipe from Good food. But the folding technique and these seasoning on top of the dough is great idea. It gives to plain short crust great flavor!