2009-02-24

Spicy, fruity salmon

This recipe originally comes from a really nice book on food and wine pairings (Kombinera mat och vin by Jens Dolk and Mette Ankarloo.) It pairs this dish with a dry German Riesling, and let me tell you from experience that the acidity in that wine works really well together with the spicy and sweet flavours, and with the fattiness of the salmon.

The original recipe uses Jerusalem artichokes and says to serve with rice or couscous, but we usually substitute potatoes, oven-roasted in the same dish as everything else, and then skip the rice/couscous. The potatoes works really well with his, and less pots and pans to clean is a good thing in my book! This time we added some carrots too; they get wonderfully sweet when roasted in the oven. The original spice mix contains cayenne pepper which makes it quite hot. This time we used ancho chili instead which made it less in-your-face spicy and gave it a more subtle, but still noticeable, heat. The original also adds curry powder (1 tsp) so chuck that in there if you want to. (And sorry, no pic of this - we were too hungry!)

Spicy oven-roasted salmon with mango


Serves 2

200 g salmon
1 mango
6 potatoes (or more if you're really hungry)
4 carrots
Olive oil
Salt

For the spice mix (you should only use dry, ground spices):
1 tsp each of ancho chili, turmeric and cinnamon
2 tsp each of cumin and ginger

Put the oven to 200 degrees C. Mix the spices together. Peel the potatoes and carrots, cut the potatoes into wedges and halve the carrots lengthwise. Put them in a roasting pan, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and add about half of the spice mix. Using your hands, mix everything around. Put in the oven for about 15 minutes.
Peel and slice the mango. Cut the salmon into portion-sized pieces and rub the rest of the spice mix on the salmon.
So, when 15 minutes have passed on the carrots and potatoes, you get the dish out and add the mango. Mix it around with the the carrots and potatoes, and then place the salmon on top of the whole deal. Cook for about 10 more minutes or until the salmon is done. (If your mango is a bit unripe, like ours was today, you might want to get it in the oven a bit earlier, say when 10 minutes or so have passed on the potatoes and carrots.)
We served it with some plain greek yoghurt as a sauce. It's also nice to add some freshly squeezed lime juice on top of the salmon. Just get some acidity in there.

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