Salmon en Croute

The December 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Simone of Junglefrog Cooking. Simone chose Salmon en Croute (or alternative recipes for Beef Wellington or Vegetable en Croute) from Good Food Online

In what's becoming a monthly pattern, we got this made just under the wire. Having left it to the last minute, we weren't able to make our own pastry crust, as Simone encouraged us to do, and as we had originally intended. Harris Teeter and frozen puff pastry crust came to our rescue. Someday we'll make it from scratch.

For this challenge, we rolled out the pastry dough to a thickness of 2 -3 mm, and then placed the salmon in the center of the rolled out crust. Atop the salmon, we placed a blended mixture of mascarpone cheese, arugula, watercress, spinach, salt, and garlic powder. Then we wrapped up the salmon, so that it looked like this:



We then made three slits in the top to allow steam to escape and brushed it with an egg wash and put in the oven for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, it came out looking like this:



We ate the salmon with broccolini that unfortunately was not photo-friendly due to overcooking. However, we both enjoyed the salmon, which looked prettier, and was more delicious than we had expected.

Thanks to Simone for a great challenge, and a surprisingly easy weeknight dinner, as long as the puff pastry crust comes from the store!