Trout Almondine (“Amandine” in French) is very quick and easy to make and wows a crowd. This recipe is for two but if you make the trout in batches and up the sauce quantity proportionally you can easily feed eight in less than 45 minutes. Skip the next intro part if you want.
Trout Almondine is in the “à la Meunière” family. All it means is it’s fish that’s been floured and served in a brown butter lemon sauce. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Julie and Julia,” when Julia Child arrives in France with Paul at their first meal she takes a bite of Dover sole à la menuière and instantly becomes enchanted with the entirety of French cuisine. I had a similar moment.
When I was 19 I was being wooed by an older gentleman (he was all of 24, but he was gainfully employed in the arts and had his own apartment, so it was like he was a generation removed from me.) He took me to a French restaurant where I had Trout Almondine and that sealed the deal. That relationship ended kind of catastrophically, I’m sad to say: I ended up moving in with him over the summer and learned that he was a serious drinker, and if I say that believe me that means something. He would have these wild mood swings and lash out in this very bitchy “Boys in the Band”-ish way. When everyone returned to campus I quickly found a platonic roommate and we got an off-campus apartment and I left no forwarding address or phone number. I still get wistful when I make this though, and I’m not prone to great sentimentality.
===================================
2 trout fillets, each 8 or 10 oz. I wouldn’t use smoked. Preferably deboned but if not don’t bother at this point, just pick them out with your fork when you’re eating. The fillets should have a skin side and a meat side. If you buy these in a supermarket chances are you’re getting one trout sliced horizontally in two.
1 plate containing white flour, for dredging
2 tbs. good olive oil, as Ina Garten always advises when using olive oil
2 tbs. whole, rich butter. Do not dare try anything “lo-fat” or some chemical factory “spread.”
4 more tbs. butter. Take 1/2 stick of butter and chop into four slices and keeping them in formation slice these in half. You do this to make the sauce go faster.
4 oz. (1/2 cup) sliced almonds, at least. You can find these in “Snak-Paks” or buy them in bulk at wholesale clubs, and everything in between in supermarkets. You can use more, I usually use a little bit more, but I’ve been served Trout Almondine that’s almost been encrusted in almonds. That, friends, is too much, and if you want to encrust seafood in nuts you do something entirely different.
1 lemon, sliced in half
1 lemon, sliced into wedges
I’m telling you, this couldn’t be easier.
Clean and dry the fillets. Salt and pepper them. Put them in the flour and cover both sides. Get rid of any excess that might be clinging to them.
In a skillet, get the olive oil really hot over medium-high heat. Add the butter carefully: there’s a good chance the oil will be in a foul mood and will splatter. Swirl this around carefully so the butter melts. This creates foam but it will die down, be patient.
Carefully, I can’t stress this enough, place the fillets skin-side down in the butter-oil combo. I don’t know why you always start with the skin-side down but it seems like you always do for stuff like this. Let them cook for 4 to 5 minutes, turn WITH YOUR TONGS, and do the other side for 3 to 4 minutes. That ought to be enough, unless your fillets are really thick, in which case you should let them go for a minute or two longer.
Move the fillets to 2 dinner plates, 1 to a customer, and keep warm. You can tent them or just shove them in the oven. This next step doesn’t take long at all.
Clean out the skillet (do not pour the remnants down the drain, sorry Roto-Rooter Man) and return to medium-high heat. Melt the 4 tbs. butter. Add the almonds and keep going for 4 minutes. The butter will brown. Turn the heat off, remove skillet to another burner, and squeeze in the juice from your halved lemon, being careful not to let any seeds fall in. Stir this around a little bit.
Take out the fillets and spoon over the sauce. I serve this with the lemon wedges, rice, and steamed asparagus.
“Hubby loves it!!!”—Cousin M, New York, NY
OMG – I bought tongs, okay? I was tong shamed and now own tongs! Excellent recipe; accessible fancy French for the win. So is the mood of the oil more foul than the current mood of our dearest CousinM? (I have no idea why there was a late, delayed gratification posting…I have referred this to the management.)
Tongs are the best, I even use mine to grab stuff on the top shelf of the cabinets.
I don’t cook or eat fish but doesn’t it fall apart when you grab it with tongs? I would go for a spatula, I think.
Depends on the type of fish. Halibut, for example, is too flaky. But tuna or bluefish will hold together nicely.
Oh hey, I planted 3 planter boxes with garlic and only 1 came up. I think it was a drainage thing, is garlic that picky about drainage?
Were these planter boxes like raised beds on the ground, or are they more like window boxes? I’ve found that very few things will grow well in a window box (other than microgreens) because the boxes are so much more susceptible to temperature changes. Too hot in the summer and freeze too hard in the winter.
There’s a little bit of a technique to it but because the trout has a cooked, sometimes crispy, skin, if you have large tongs and you start from the tail end and get as close to the head as you can it works. Spatulas are usually too short for a whole fillet like this. You can always slice the fillets in half crosswise and make them that way.
Congrats on the tongs! They will change your life (since you cook a lot).
I should be grateful to that emotionally abusive drunkard of a boyfriend; it was because of him, and his apartment’s kitchen, that I first started cooking on my own. He could barely heat up a can of soup and for him it was either go out to a restaurant or pick up fast food. I think I mentioned this before but my university’s cafeteria served horrendous food, and I had some year-ahead-of-me gal pals who knew how to cook and enjoyed it, so about once a week I’d go to their off-campus apartment (the residential dorms were also something that should have been closed down by the public authorities) and I’d do scut work and watch them and learn. Then two or three times a week I’d make dinner for the bibulous boyfriend and I and he thought I was like a miracle worker. He never learned anything, because when he wasn’t working late he’d spend his evenings lost in the fog of this very specific drink he’d make for himself. I can’t really remember what it was, it was Cape Codders I think.
It was all for the best though, because shortly after graduation I met Better Half and we became roommates. Poor guy didn’t stand a chance. He was another one who couldn’t cook, and at this point I was getting pretty good at it, and you know what they say, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
That has literally backfired on me every single time – I get a guy by cooking delicious food and then can’t get rid of his ass. Totally quit cooking for men ages ago.
@Sedevilc, still snorting with laughter…the truth is always the best humor!
@MatthewCrawley “poor guy didn’t stand a chance” – Lucky for him, I say!
He might disagree, especially nowadays.
*raises hand
I used tongs to fish something out that fell under a shelf the other day. Uses beyond the kitchen!
This is a great way to cook trout and it’s easy to find high quality sustainable farm raised trout these days for reasonable prices.
I love trout, I always order it at my favorite breakfast spot. There’s nothing better than trout and home fries in the morning. I’ve never cooked it like this but will certainly give it a try.
I had no idea that this was a simple recipe. I’ve had it several times when eating out.
And it’s easy to get fresh trout out here in the summer, so I’m definitely going to make this.
That’s the thing, so many recipes are! Last year around Christmas I posted two or three almost comically absurd complicated recipes, because that’s when I really (used to) put a lot of thought and effort into it, and I like a good Kitchen Challenge. Elliecoo, for example, posted a recipe for Chicken Cordon Bleu. The first time I had it I was a young adult and thought I could never make my own. But shortly thereafter I was in a library and they had a cookbook that had a recipe for it, so I checked the book out, brought it home, read the recipe three or four times, and thought, “That’s it?” So I made it and it was delicious.
Stews are another good example. You think, “Oh God, this is delicious. But I could never make this on my own.” Of course you can! You can find recipes where the meat is prepared in very finicky ways and then it goes in a slow cooker for eight hours or something ridiculous, but keep searching. Where do people think stews came from? Table scraps, thrown together out of necessity/desperation by people 3- or 500 years ago, cooking out of a pail suspended over an open hearth.
I could write a whole book demystifying sauces. If you consult a vintage Larousse Gastronomique (and who among us has not?) a lot of the sauces seem far beyond the reach of the amateur, novice cook. But they don’t have to be. Almost always you can find a version that is 95% as good and involves 5% of the effort.
Still cranky, I guess.
What kind of crazed psychomaniac doesn’t use tongs?
…
@myopicprophet – that would have been me…I was the crazed psychomaniac. Don’t even get me started on how terrible limp rubber spatulas are…
Limp rubber spatulas are for “protecting” stick-resistant pans. Only crazed psycho-er-maniacs use stick-resistant pans.