I Seafood, I Eat it. In St. Andrews.

Posted by Michael on Jun 12, 2010 in Recipes | 2 comments

The smell of boiling lobster hit us like a fragrant blanket the instant we got out of our car on a side street in St. Andrews, New Brunswick today.

Just a block away, a local church group had two huge kettles going full blast with up to 20-pound bags of lobster, precision -timed so the prized local crustacean would come out just perfect.   About 20 people lined up at the boiling station in the punishing New Brunswick heat – about 24 degrees Celsius, hey, it’s New Brunswick – to get their batch of lobsters boiled, just minutes after buying them on the St. Andrews waterfront dock for a steal-of-a-deal $6 per pound.

That was our first welcome to the St. Andrews Seafood Festival, a five-day, town-wide buffet of all things seafood.

Further down the street to the Town Square, it was indeed a festival atmosphere as vendors sold everything from ocean-inspired jewellery to, yes, seafood.   There was a guy selling sausages.  He looked lonely.

I got my hands on a $14 pack of Wolfhead Smokers Ltd. cold-smoked Atlantic Salmon.  A quick sample of it was all the convincing I needed.  Really nice stuff.

The main attraction for me though was to take in some of the chef demonstrations that were happening through the morning and early afternoon.   I’m not one for really fancy food and thankfully the chefs doing the demos this day kept things simple and accessible, probably because they know their audience (primarily home cooks).

Jean-Francois Fortin, the Executive Sous-Chef at the Fairmont Algonquin Hotel in St. Andrews did a demonstration on how to make salmon and smoked sturgeon tartar with kelp salad.   Loads of local stuff in a recipe that takes under 30 minutes to make and is a jaw-dropper for flavour.   It’s one of those dishes that reminds you that you really should eat more seafood.  It can really be crazy good.

Salmon and Smoked Sturgeon Tartar with Kelp Salad

by Jean-Francois Fortin, Executive Sous-Chef, Fairmont Algonquin Hotel

Yield: 4 portions   Preparation time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

1/2 pound Salmon

1/4 pound Smoked sturgeon

1 shallot

1 teaspoon fresh dill

1 pound fresh kelp

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 egg yolk

1 teaspoon dijon mustard

salt and pepper

1 lemon

1 orange

Method:

Fish:  Finely dice salmon and sturgeon.  Add minced shallot and fresh dill.

Mayonnaise:

Put the egg yolk and dijon mustard in a mixing bowl and emulsify with EVOO.  Add half the juice of one lemon and half the juice of one orange.  Mix the fish and mayonnaise together and add the zest of one orange plus salt and pepper to taste.

Enjoy with your favourite greens.

Note:  In the demo, Chef Fortin used a small ring mold to plate up some of the fish tartar, then topped with the kelp salad.  Here was one of the samples, served up on a crouton toast.

After all that, we made our way down the end of the huge wharf in St. Andrews and got ourselves five pounds of lobster.  We walked that over to the church group that was doing the cooking and headed back home, continuing the festival around our own dinner table.

Other images from the day:

Alexandra, 4, squeezes some fresh lemon on a P.E.I. mussel we had just before we headed back to Rothesay.

A P.E.I. mussel, fresh and steamed to perfection.

Chef Fortin dices some smoked sturgeon for his tartar recipe.

Another of St. Andrews’ biggest seafood fans, a seal at the Huntsman Aquarium.