Halibut in a Cream and Saffron Sauce with Fondant Potatoes

You could call this a disaster, given that it didn’t turn out anything like we expected it to. It wasn’t brilliant but it was definitely edible and, with a little tweaking, could be a good dish.

We started off by making the fondant potatoes, using this Gordon Ramsay recipe. It’s quite a lengthy process and I’m not sure we got it completely right; the potatoes were cooked through but didn’t seem to take on much flavour from the stock. The texture was rather reminiscient of boiled potatoes which I found a little off-putting.

Next came the sauce which was straightforward: soften some shallots in butter for around three minutes, add some saffron and deglaze with dry sherry. Cook for about three minutes, add about a glass of wine, cook until the alchohol has evaporated, add a small pot of cream, some salt and pepper, some cayenne pepper and then keep warm until needed. At this point we added some cooked mussels (we couldn’t find raw), for decoration purposes really. Not entirely necessary as they didn’t add anything flavour-wise. Somewhere along the way, Stephen decided it was too thin so tried to thicken it with cornflour which turned it rather gloopy. The flavour was good though so I think the essence was right.

The fish was dusted with some paprika and salt flour before being fried for around 10 minutes. This was the best part of the dish, the fish was perfectly cooked and had a good crust thanks to the flour.

So, not a bad effort but sadly not perfect. We also forgot the vegetables which didn’t help.