Daring Cooks December salmon en croute

This month I did my first Daring Cooks challenge! Salmon en croute. We had the option to do other things in pastry if we wanted but I wanted to do something I have never done before and I had never ever cooked fish before.

I mean seriously this is the first piece of fish I have ever even touched in its raw form (other than sushi and I just pop that in my mouth ASAP).

So fish is gross. Really, really, really gross. Salmon is pretty much the only kind of fish I can even imagine eating cooked. But skinning it and handling it raw was one of the nastiest things i have done. I have a pretty crappy collection of knives so I was super thankful that the skin came off pretty easy.

I made the shortcust pastry the day be fore using the following measurements
Ingredients:
450 gr (15.8 ounces or 3.2 cups ) of plain all purpose flour
200 gr ( 7 ounce) cold butter
pinch of salt

Sift the flour into a large bowl, add the butter and rub in with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. If you have a food processor you can use that as shown in the above video. Stir in the salt, then add 2-3 tbsp of water and mix to a firm dough. Knead the dough briefly and gently on a floured surface. Wrap in cling film and chill while preparing the filling. For best results make sure the butter is very cold. But it was way too floury and I ended up adding like 6 or 7 tablespoons of water and it made a huge amount of pastry.But none of that mattered because when I went to take it out of the fridge the next day I found out that my fridge is dying and is freezing everything so there it is a frozen solid rock of pastry. The pastry was pretty easy to make so I just made another one real quick and I cut the recipe in half (and still had to add more than 3T of water and had more than enough pastry).

I just had super bad luck with the pastry. This was a brand new measuring cut and it snapped right in half when all I was doing was scooping flour. The wine bottle came out after this and everything at least felt like it went a little smoother :)

For the filing I used cream cheese, lemon juice and dill. I love dill! and I had never used it fresh before, it is definitely going to become a staple in my house from now on

Here it is all spread out and ready to bake

I cut fish shaped steam vents.

I had so much leftover pastry that I decided at the last minute to make a mini veggie version with some mushrooms I had hat I needed to use.

Here it all done! It was super delicious.