Whisk Wednesdays—Bar à la Normande (Sea Bass with Mushrooms and Cream)

Here is another fish dish with a creamy and delicious sauce that marks my 200th post!

Fish Stock
The first step for this dish is to make some fish stock. We covered this in Class 10. The recipe for the stock makes 4 cups and I only needed 1 cup for the fish, so I put the remainder in the freezer for another time.

Fish
The recipe calls for a whole sea bass, however, I had some leftover pieces from earlier fish classes so I decided to use them up instead.

To cook the fish, I placed it in a roasting pan with 3 tablespoons of butter and sprinkled the fish with salt, pepper and the shallots. I poured the wine and water in and brought everything to a boil while waiting for the oven to heat up. Then, when it was boiling I covered it with buttered parchment and put it in the oven to finish cooking for about 20-30 minutes.

Mushrooms
I love mushrooms. These are just cooked in butter and seasoned with salt and pepper while the fish cooks.

Sauce
When the fish was done, I removed it from the roasting pan and set it aside while finishing the sauce. The sauce couldn't be simpler. I just strained the liquid from the roasting pan and reduced it by half. Then I added the sour cream (since I forgot to make crème fraîche the night before). I stirred this mixture until it thickened.

Crème Fraîche
To make crème fraîche, combine 1 cup (250 mL) of heavy 35-percent cream with 2 tablespoons (25 mL) sour cream in a glass container. Cover and stand at room temperature 24 hours, or until very thick. Stir well, cover and refrigerate. Keeps up to 7 days.

Video
You can watch a video, in French, of a chef making this dish. I enjoyed watching his technique.

Recipe

Serves 6

Sea bass, Salmon, Sole
(I had these pieces leftover in my freezer so decided to use them up this week.)

3 pounds sea bass or striped bass
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 shallots, chopped fine
Salt
Pepper
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup fish stock (or water)
1 pound mushrooms, sliced fine
1¼ cups crème fraîche

Unsalted butter, softened, for parchment paper

Fish Stock:
2 whole whiting, 8 ounces each
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 medium onions, chopped
4 shallots, chopped
2 leeks (white part only), chopped
1 Bouquet Garni
10 peppercorns
1½ cups dry white wine
3 cups water
You can find the recipe for Bar à la Normande (Sea Bass with Mushrooms and Cream) in the book Le Cordon Bleu at Home. To see how the rest of the Whisk Wednesdays group fared with their recipe, click here (or check out the sidebar) and then click on each blogger!

Tasting Notes
I love fish with a sauce. And this one with mushrooms is delicious. The whole house smelled of fish, but it was worth it. The nuttiness from the mushrooms, the delicate fish and the tangy sauce were perfect.

Next Week (February 11)
Pigeonneaux en Papillote (Squab Cooked in Papillotes) pages 219-220 {Substitute salmon for squab.}
— or —
Snapper with fennel en papillote from Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cook Home Collection
— or —
Salmon and Tomatoes en Papillote from Dorie Greenspan

. . . . . . . . . .

Running total: $1,049.29 + $9.81 (fish and sauce) + $4.06 (fish stock) = $1,063.16

Butter used so far: 9 pounds, 24 tablespoons

. . . . . . . . . .

::Whisk Wednesdays::
We're cooking our way through a cooking school curriculum using the Le Cordon Bleu at Home cookbook. The "classes" are based on the Le Cordon Bleu curriculum found online and used as a guideline. Not all the items in the curriculum are in the cookbook, but most are. Where the items are not in the book, we try to find a suitable substitution. Find out more here.

If you like this post, share it!