Home & Lifestyle, Food
Sauté: Dover Sole With Pommes Château
Lesson time 23:19 min
Chef Keller shows you how to cook a dish that has been cherished by generations and is served with a classic garnish of pommes château.
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Topics include: Sauté: Dover Sole With Pommes Château
Teaches Cooking Techniques III: Seafood, Sous Vide, and Desserts
Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.
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[MUSIC PLAYING] - There are two fish, I think, which are of royalty. One of them is the turbot and the second one is Dover sole. It's one of those fish that has been around and very popular for generations. But before we get to the Dover sole, I'm going to teach you how to make pommes cháteau. We're using the pommes cháteau as a garnish. It's a classic garnish also for Dover sole. And it's just really boiled potatoes. We're going to boil them with a little bit of herbs. In this case, we have some thyme, some bay leaf, some garlic cloves to add a little bit of flavor to that. I'm going to crush that garlic clove. Gets that flavor out. And some peppercorns. Of course, those will be taken out after the potatoes are cooked. We want to cook our potatoes where there is no resistance. And you know that when it's a raw potato, I can barely stick my knife in there without it sticking. So there's a lot of resistance in that. Of course, when it's cooked, we're going to be able to pierce the flesh of the potato and pull the knife out without it sticking in the knife. So that's what we call no resistance. So historically, a pommes cháteau has to have seven sides, six of them equal and one of them a little broader so that it can actually sit flat on your plate. I remember when I first learned how to do this and the difficulty of actually doing a cháteau potato, and being watched over the shoulder by my mentor, Roland Henin, which is a wonderful French chef from Leone, but an imposing figure. And to have him standing over your shoulder while you're trying to turn 150 pommes cháteau, ooh, don't want to go there. This is a Red Bliss potato. We would never, ever use a baking potato, or an Idaho potato, for this. We always want to use a dense potato. Red Bliss, Yukon gold are all good potatoes to use for this preparation. I would just say this, it does create a lot of potato waste. So if you're against that and you don't really care about the way it looks or recreating something that's historic, like a pommes cháteau, then you can just peel it, and that's fine as well. But when I make a pommes cháteau, I use what we call a beak paring knife because it allows me to hold it in my hand and do that without a lot of effort. So turning potatoes. Of course, a potato is a vegetable, so we also turn carrots. We turn turnips. We turn rutabagas. We turn beets. Anything that is dense enough to turn, we've been known to turn. OK, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, one flat side. So we go ahead and bring them over to our burner. Just turn that on, let them simmer. It shouldn't take more than 15 minutes once they come to a simmer. Of course, we always start our potatoes in cold water and let them come up. We never would ever put potatoes in hot water or boiling water. It makes it that much more difficult to cook. Now I'm going to show you two ways of removing the skin from our Dover sole. One, fairly easy-- look at that guy. Flat fish, two eyes on top, dark top ...
About the Instructor
In his third MasterClass, Chef Thomas Keller focuses on preparing fresh seafood like lobster and salmon, making classic desserts such as apple pie and lemon tart, and showing how sous vide cooking can be done at home to enhance flavor and texture. Whether you’re a beginning or advanced cook, you’ll learn the techniques and principles that will give you the understanding and skills to get the most delicious results.
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Thomas Keller
Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.
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