Why Poach?

Sometime in the 1980's, when I was in early high school, our family took a brief summer vacation up the coast of British Columbia. They called the stretch the "Sunshine Coast", which is all relative because to Pacific Northwesterners, a glimpse of the sun is a heat wave. It was a fairly low-budget vacation so instead of taking a charter boat and angling for trophy salmon, my dad, brother Eric and I rented a dingy with an outboard motor and some tackle and puttered out a few hundred yards off shore. We might as well have been dropping our lines into a swimming pool because a couple hours into it and nothing was happening. My dad's line was stuck on something but he insisted that he may have a fish. My brother and I had fun ridiculing him until, after several minutes of tugging and reeling, he pulled up a prehistoric looking fish. Turns out it was a rock cod and it was all we caught that day.

Back at the cabin my mom cooked it up for dinner that night. I don't know what made her decide to use a moist heat method but she did. She may have actually steamed it but the legend goes that she poached it. I have never tasted anything more bland in my life and from that moment on my brother and I have had disdain for poaching...until recently.

After watching a Food Network show on poaching I became intrigued because the host stated that if your poaching liquid maintained the target temperature for the meat then it could sit in the liquid endlessly and not over cook. Knowing that fish can pass that ideal window of doneness so quickly made me interested in trying this. I gave it a shot with salmon, using a classic poaching liquid and I was very pleased (mother is vindicated).


The key was keeping the liquid at a modest temperature - I chose around 150 degrees, using my remote thermometer for constant monitoring. The poaching liquid was water with some acid (lemon and/or white wine and/or vinegar), bay leaves and peppercorns. I'm sure real poaching liquid recipes are easy to find on the internets. Because it's such a gentle cooking method the window of doneness is pretty broad. I just squeezed the fillets to see when they felt done but you could always cut into them. It takes much longer than baking or broiling because the temp is so low.

If the liquid is a little shallow, you can cover it to make sure the top gets cooked (see photo). The upside with poaching is that you have substantial leeway as to when the fish is ready and you could even cut the heat and let it sit while you prepared other things. The other big benefit is that the fish turns out incredibly tender and moist. The downside is that it is fairly bland because it doesn't develop any crisp, browned surfaces that 'high & dry' cooking provide. Therefore, be sure to make a flavorful sauce to go with it. Anything from a lemon-herb sauce, homemade tartar sauce or a olive-caper tapenade would work. I know poaching works great with salmon but I still suspect that rock cod would be useless cooked this way because it's bland to begin with. Come to think of it, I think rock cod is pretty useless no matter what you do with it. And it's the ugliest looking fish I've ever seen.