Photo: Pal Hansen
Jay Rayner is turning the tables. The award-winning restaurant critic – 25 years on the Observer, two and counting on the Financial Times – has a new book showcasing his own efforts in the kitchen. This, after all, is the man who two years ago triumphed in Masterchef’s Battle of the Critics, seizing the Golden Cutlery trophy. In 2024, Jay published Nights Out at Home, in which he showed readers how to recreate some of the best meals he had eaten in restaurants. Now comes the sequel: Nights Out in the Kitchen: More Recipes and Stories from a Restaurant Critic’s Life. As he puts it: “To step out into the light as a writer of recipes, having been known for so long only as someone who eats other people’s food … is a tricky manoeuvre … a flamboyant coming-out.”
This salmon wrapped in pastry takes its inspiration from memories of watching his mum (Claire Rayner, famed as an agony aunt in the 1970s). “As a kid I always knew when my mother had someone important coming to dinner. She would start preparing a coulibiac.” No longer in vogue, they were, he says, “a long, vaguely cylindrical puff-pastry pie filled with fish, among other things”. He devised his salmon en croute as a treat for a pescatarian friend. “Think of it as a much younger sibling of the coulibiac; one which knows what it wants to be when it grows up.” He adds that it is “a very good dinner dish for when you want people to think you’ve gone that extra mile”.
Words by Jane Ferguson
Photographs by Will Carne and Pal Hansen
Photo: Will Carne
Jay’s salmon en croute
Serves 2
Ingredients
2 skinless salmon fillets, each between 120g and 150g
Table salt
3 generous tbsp creme fraiche
1 tsp lemon juice
Cracked black pepper
20g rocket, very roughly chopped
½ a 320g roll of shop-bought puff pastry
1 beaten egg
Method
Season the skinned salmon fillets all over with table salt.
In a bowl, mix the creme fraiche with the lemon juice, and season generously to taste with salt and black pepper. Mix the rocket into the creme fraiche. Don’t worry about the volume of greenery to creme fraiche. It will all mix in.
Roll out the pastry and lay the first salmon fillet on it, 3-4cm from the left-hand edge. Top the salmon with the creme fraiche mix to about a centimetre’s depth. Lay the second fillet on top, to make as tidy a rectangle as possible.
You may well have two of the long thin fillets. They are generally about 15cm long, 5cm wide, thick at one end and thinner at the other. Skin them, then slice them in half across the middle. Put the two thick pieces close together side by side to form a rough square. Top with the creme fraiche mix, then place the thinner pieces, inverted, on top of the fatter pieces. You will have formed a manageable block from the thin fillets.
Brush the edge of the pastry with beaten egg, then fold it to make a neat parcel. In keeping with the variable size of the salmon fillets, the size of your parcel will vary. You will want an edge of a centimetre or two on both sides and at each end. Once you’ve closed it off, trim off any excess pastry.
At this point you can have some fun, if you fancy, by shaping your salmon en croute to look vaguely like a fish. You can use any excess pastry to fashion a tail and a pectoral fin, and use a sharp knife to cut in a snout and an eye. Or you can roll your eyes at the mere suggestion and do none of that. Either way, egg-wash the whole parcel and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours. Helpfully, this means you can make enough of these for dinner in advance and then bake them when the time comes.
Very lightly oil an oven tray and put it in the oven as it heats up to 220C/Gas Mark 7. When the oven has reached its temperature, add an extra layer of egg wash to your salmon en croute and transfer it to the hot tray. This helps ensure a crisper bottom. Bake for 20-25 mins, until golden brown.
Although it’s great straight from the oven, it can also be eaten cold.
Nights Out in the Kitchen: More Recipes and Stories from a Restaurant Critic's Life is published by Fig Tree (RRP £22; buy it at a discount at the Nerve Bookshop)