Klagenfurt Greets Tokyo
11 August 2008
Last week I visited my parents in the southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt, a neat lakeside town with a pretty mountain scenery in the background (the place sooo feels like summer holidays!). I had promised my parents to prepare a Japanese dinner one evening, so I had brought a whole bunch of cooking ingredients from Tokyo – soba noodles, hijiki seaweed, different types of sesame, as well as dried bonito flakes and kombu seaweed to make dashi.
The fresh products, of course, I had to buy locally, and I soon realized I had to change my original plans a bit and become creative. While there were certain things (such as spinach leaves) I couldn’t find at all, I did get shiitake mushrooms, but they were somewhat wobbly in texture and later unfortunately turned out to taste as watery as they looked. On the other hand, there were mouth-watering fresh chanterelles (“Eierschwammerl” in Austria or “Pfifferlinge” in Germany), which were wonderfully tasty and could well live up to the strong taste of the hijiki seaweed and the black sesame I mixed them with. It is just often a good idea to use fresh local products rather than their exotic counterparts – even if some combinations seem odd at first sight (I was actually quite skeptical while cooking), the results can indeed be surprising!
In the end my Austro-Japanese dinner consisted of cold soba with chives and a dashi dip, a salad of avocado, cocktail tomatoes and the (watery) shiitake mushrooms with a wasabi-sesame dressing, and the said fusion of Austrian chanterelles with hijiki seaweed and black sesame, topped with pieces of marinated seared salmon filets. This dish, although the most unusual combination, was clearly the “star” of the evening. After finishing the salmon, my parents used the soba noodles to absorb even the last drops of the chanterelle sauce, savouring every single bit of it...
Seared Salmon Bedded on Chanterelles and Hijiki
| serves 4 |
| 400g boneless salmon filet, about 3-4 cm thick |
| some oil for frying |
for the marinade |
| 50ml soy sauce |
| 50ml cooking sake |
| 1 tablespoon of honey |
| 2 teaspoons of freshly grated ginger |
for the chanterelles |
| 200g chanterelles (or try out with other tasty wild mushrooms) |
| a hand full of dried hijiki seaweed |
| 1 tablespoon of black sesame seeds |
| some garlic powder |
| some oil for frying |
If the salmon filet comes with skin, remove the skin with the help of a sharp knife. Part the filet into long strips of about 4 cm width (so the cross-section would more or less be a square). Mix the soy sauce, the sake, the freshly grated ginger and the honey and stir well until the latter has completely dissolved. Place the salmon filets in the marinade, cover with cling film or a lid and let the container rest in the fridge for at least an hour or so.
Let the dried hijiki seaweed rehydrate in a bowl of water for about 30 minutes. Meanwhile thoroughly clean the chanterelles and, if they are fairly large, cut them into bite-sized pieces. Drain the seaweed and rinse it well, then shake off the water as well as possible. Heat a little bit of oil in a frying pan and briefly sauté the hijiki seaweed together with the mushrooms. Season with some garlic powder and a small pinch of salt (don’t salt it too much yet, as the soy sauce will add some more saltiness later). Keep stirring for a few minutes and add the black sesame seeds.
Take the salmon out of its marinade and sear it in a very hot pan for only 1-2 minutes on each side, so it gets browned on the outside but keeps a raw core. Once you have placed the salmon in the pan, pour the remaining dip into the mushroom and seaweed mixture. Turn up the heat and let the liquid reduce to a thick sauce.
To serve, arrange the mushroom sauce in small bowls. Cautiously slice the salmon filets (they tend to fall apart) and place them on top.