Starter · Year-round
Salmon rillette with lemon and chive
Rustic, not smooth. Toasted bread, cold rillette, a warm room.
I learned this in Stockholm, between portrait shoots, the year I was pretending I was a photographer first and a cook second. Hötorget market, early August, a fishmonger named Erik who'd lost two fingers to a herring boat in the seventies. He sold me a slab of salmon, then watched me from across the counter while he wrote down. In English with the spelling of someone who'd learned it on ships. How to make rillette. 'No machine,' he wrote, twice, underlined.
Salmon rillette is one of those preparations where the whole craft is in not overworking it. Steam the fish gently, pull it into flakes, fold the rest in with a wooden spoon. Touch it as little as possible. The texture is the whole point. If you can spread it like pâté, you've gone too far.
Make it the morning before. Six hours in the fridge and the flavours line up. A day too far and it goes flat. Lemon, chive, butter, a bit of crème fraîche to round it. Toasted sourdough. That's the whole evening.
- Total time
- 30 min
- Serves
- 2 people
- Difficulty
- 2 / 5
- Pair with
- Sancerre or a bone-dry Riesling.
Ingredients
Rillette
- 200 gfresh salmon fillet, skin off
- 60 gsmoked salmon, finely chopped
- 60 gcrème fraîche
- 30 gsoft butter
- ½ bunchchive, finely sliced
- 1lemon (zest of one, juice of half)
To serve
- 4 slicessourdough
- drizzleolive oil + fleur de sel
Method
- 1
Season the fresh salmon lightly. Steam on parchment at 80 °C for 8 minutes. Core temp 50 °C. Let it cool fully.
- 2
Pluck the cooled salmon into rough flakes with a fork. Don't go for tidy. Texture is everything.
- 3
Fold in the smoked salmon, crème fraîche, soft butter, chive, lemon zest and juice. Carefully. No mashing.
- 4
Taste. Salt, white pepper, more lemon if it needs lift. One hour in the fridge. Minimum. Ideally six.
- 5
Toast the sourdough hard with a film of olive oil. Spoon the rillette on rough. Fleur de sel. Lemon wedge alongside.
