 See how to make scallopines of salmon, it's a technique that I learned from Guy Savoie who learned it from the brothers, Trois Gros Brothers, a Swiss star Michelin in Roan, France. So I brought two fish so that we can play more with textures. The salmon, which is the one that the Trois Gros Brothers are using with their famous scallopine and a sorrel sauce, and also an arctic char, which is something that is specific to America, that we don't have in France. In France, the closest cousin will be Homme Le Chevalier from both lakes, Lake Annecy in the Alps, and Lake Le Mans, which is wrongly called Lake Geneva. So for the salmon, you see that the way it arrived to us, the skin is off, but the blood line is still in, and that's really a problem because that will turn black when we cook. So we are going to put the salmon flat on the board. In the kitchen, the only thing that we know that is flat is the cutting board. So we are going to put it flat, and then with a knife, we are just going to cut a small layer of this blood line, the knife and the eyes following the board and not the salmon. Okay, so we have one layer down, just a little extra here, so I'm going to do this like that. So here we have our salmon here. So obviously you see that this part here is almost double the size of this. So we are going to cut it so that it's even, as even as possible, then Etern is going to tap it down so that it can cook evenly. So we do one, let's start with one here. So this part here is a thinnest, so I'm going to take it as a template or as a sample and I'm just going to go across the salmon with my fingers flat just to maintain it and absolutely not pushing it down. And again, my eyes and my knives are following the cutting board so that everybody stays flat. And here we go. I flip here and we have now a scallopini of salmon that is even with some difference at the top in the center cut and at the end. So I'm going to pass that to Etern and you're going to wrap it up one time, okay, one more time and then with the cleaver you're going to tap it down very, very gently so that it's all even and will cook perfectly evenly in the pan. So the same thing with the cleaver here. You want it to be completely flat so you cannot use your cleaver like so. You will have to use it like that, right? So that it's flat and even with the board. Okay, check it. How is it? It's getting there. Okay, push down a little bit the thinner part inside. During the cooking process that's going to glue together the albumin is going to coagulate and therefore the salmon will be completely flat. Alright, so I do one more salmon and then I get something a little bit more challenging. Okay, you see here that this piece of salmon is much bigger, thicker than the first one. So I'm going to do one flip, okay, and then I still have room to do another one, right? So I'll do one more flip and here we go. I have a salmon now that I can deal with. If I want to cut it in half and make tasting portion, I can do that now. I can also decide that my ideal size will be this so I can cut here and keep that on the side to add to another part. Because the purpose of this exercise is to have all the salmon being exactly the same thickness so they cook evenly at the same time. One more for you. Alright, so what you are doing is that I'm just going to challenge myself with the artichoke which is a much more delicate fish and therefore will be a little bit more challenging. Do you think I can do it? Oh, of course I can. So we are removing first the skin, whoa, I don't know, well let's see. So flat on the board, I'm going to get a little hand earlier and off I go, cross. This is of course a lot more difficult than the salmon, right? So off we go, half of it, the other half, depending on your food cost and your selling point, you might as well just put all the belly aside and sell it as a rillette or another preparation, right? But for this purpose here we are going to try to get as much out of this as we can. So again with the bloodline here, you just see the way it's moving on the board that it's a little bit more delicate, the muscle part, the way the muscles of this fish is built is a lot more delicate and breakable, which I love because otherwise it will not challenge me enough. Okay, so here we go with this, all right. So I'm using a chef knife and it might be a little hard but the reason for that is that it's the surface of it is large enough so that it's not bending too much. If I use this knife, which I love for paring and stuff like that for paring, it's not going to give me the exact precision that I have on this bigger knife that is just plain hard. So here we have the same technique, right? This is thin, this is bigger and we are going to go straight down in the center and do just only one flip. The reason I'm not starting from here on this specific piece of fish is that I don't want it to be too thin. So I'm just going to go down a little bit and then do one cut. Wow, this is pretty, pretty, pretty fragile here. Don't panic, I have it. Okay, whoop, here we go. Okay, not bad, not bad, not bad. All right, give it a tap so that we can cook evenly. Now if you have the tails, you're going to say, what am I going to do with the tails? Well, actually that is pretty simple. So you see that the tail here, you have the spine where the bones are, right? And then the two tiny little filets. So you're not going to try to make it complicated. You are going to go straight down, I take my small knife for that, you're going to go straight down and then just turn inside here and boom, there you are. Now you have a small piece here, same thing on the other side. And you're going to put them exactly reverse, right? So that when they are together, it's a square. That during cooking process, the albumin is going to just glue together and that will be a solid piece. I want to see if I can find one that will be exactly the same. So I'm just going to speed up here. So I'm removing the bloodline. I'm going to do one, two, three cuts here. So one cut, okay, one more. Okay, now you saw that I have this piece here now. Now I have these two playways, right? So that I can get two person easy out of that. So I'm going to do a clean cut, all right? We are going to put them together just to make it more challenging. This one here you see that it's bumpy, then you have a hole, then you have the cut center, then you have another hole. So it's going to be more interesting to tap it down. All right. So you see the ID, first remove of course the skin, best as you can finish it with your small knife and then you want to have the bloodline of course removed because otherwise it will be completely black when you cut it. Talking about cutting, why don't we just try to do a few of them? Because they are flat, it's going to be pretty easy to control the timing on that. And one of the questions that is often asked is what is the right size? What is the right size for a scallopine? It's very simple. It's whatever fit in the pan because you can always put two slices, put two slices, put three slices for tasting menu, a little bit less, etc, etc. So I'm going to start with a salmon one. So you see that they are perfectly wrapped now, so no air. So when there is no air, there is no multiplication of bacteria. So we are pretty good with that. We can keep that a couple of days. Mise en place. Solid Mise en place. We love it. All right. So we are going to cut to cook this scallopini. So we don't have to worry much about the blood vessel and the bloodline and the way it's going to be presented because we already took care of that, right? So we are going to put just a dash of oil in our casserole here. Okay. Thank you. All right. We put it down. It's going to be pretty quick, but the beauty of it is that all of them are going to cook exactly the same way because we control first, we control the thickness of them. So we don't have to guess it. After we have the timing for one, then we'll have the timing for all of them. Love it when it's simple. Love it. Love it. Love it. So the Tragon brothers were serving that with a sorrel sauce. So it was a beurre blanc base, and then they put the sorrel roe in it and just cook it like you would cook a spinach inside the sauce, and they become incredibly famous with this sauce. You know, you can borrow it now. It's fine. As long as you say that it's coming from Tragon, you'll be fine. So I'm going to cook it not too much. I'm not going to cook it through because when you serve that on a warm plate, the plate itself is going to finish the cooking process if you have a warm plate. And you don't want the salmon over cooked. So when it leaves the kitchen, the salmon is almost sashimi. When it gets to the customer, it's cooked to perfection. All right. What do you think? Right there. I think it's right there. Yeah, it's right there. Okay. So there we go. A scallopini of salmon cooked evenly all the way through, and you can make as many as you want. Mise en place. Keep them for a couple of days, and you saute them, either a teflon or a cast iron, and here it is. Enjoy. That's it for today, and we'll see you pretty soon with another good tip for cooking at Neki. Thank you.