Salmon Chervil and Fennel on Sourdough

Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread cookbook has some wonderful bread-centric recipes. Among his "day old bread recipes" is a Dungeness Crab sandwich. Of course a sandwich is a fine use of day old bread, but if day old is good then fresh is better. Let's face it, bread is the sine qua non of a sandwich. A sandwich without bread is just a mess. Take a moment, or even better, the rest of your life to obsess about the bread for your sandwiches. Here is a picture of the loaf I baked this morning and the bread I'll be using for this sandwich:

It was baked according to Chad's country sourdough recipe. 75% hydration, 10% Trader Joe's white whole wheat, and 90% Central Milling organic all purpose flour. Pickup a copy of Tartine Bread for detailed instructions on the bread. And try my sourdough hydration calculator here. Chad's sandwich recipe is just a simple meat salad sandwich with a decidedly french attitude. Here, the filling for the sandwich differs from Chad's recipe by using salmon rather than the crab. I had a few tins of wild Alaskan pink salmon on hand and substituted it.

Salad Ingredients:

• 2 - 6 ounce cans salmon
• 1 bunch fresh chervil chopped
• 1 bunch fresh tarragon chopped
• 2 tbsp. mayonnaise
• 1 tsp dijon mustard
• zest of 1 lemon
• salt/pepper to taste

Mix the salad ingredients well. I recommend preparing it several hours in advance because as the flavors mix it gets better. If your bread is older or store bought you will want to toast it, but if you are working with a lovely warm moist chewy loaf of fresh sourdough, just skip it and enjoy that amazing texture and the fresh anise and citrus flavors of the salad mixing with the warm buttery sourness of fresh, naturally leavened bread. I had mine with some fresh cherries.

These cherries were all conjoined twins. Two pits to each cherry. Enjoy! Sending this to YeastSpotting