Chef Rengarajan Venkatachalapathy is the chef at House of Dosas

Chef Rengarajan Venkatachalapathy presents House of Dosas' Salmon Dosa

Ingredients

Dosa Crepe

• 1 cup Black gram lentils
• 3 cups Rice
• Salt (to taste)

Salmon Stuffing

• 100 g Salmon
• 1 tbsp Oil
• 1 pinch Cumin
• 1 pinch Mustard
• 1 pinch Fennel
• 1 twig Curry leaves
• 1 half Onion
• 1 half Tomato
• 1 pinch Turmeric powder
• 3 tsp Coconut milk
• Roasted chili powder (to taste)
• Tamarind Juice (to taste)
• Salt (to taste)

Method

To make the crepe

1. Soak the lentils and rice in the water separately for two hours. Then rinse and wash the lentils and rice thoroughly. Grind it together and add some salt.
2. Leave the batter for two hours or longer at room temperature, until it's fermented. Use a heavy ladle to make thin crepe on medium fire.
3. Add salmon stuffing in the middle and roll it up. Serve hot with coconut chutney or tomato pickle and curry lentils.

Salmon stuffing

1. Heat a pan, add oil and the cumin, mustard and fennel. Fry for a two seconds and then add curry leaves and onion. Saute it until brown.
2. Add chili and turmeric with tomatoes. Cook for another minute.
3. Now add salt and the salmon and tamarind juice until salmon is cooked. Do not overcook the salmon.
4. Add coconut milk and cook for another minute.

House of Dosas
1391 Kingsway, Vancouver, BC.
Telephone: 604-875-1283
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 12 pm-10pm
Monday closed

TAKING A FRESH LOOK AT SALMON

What Salmon Eat

All salmon, wild and farmed, are carnivores, or meat-eaters. In the wild, they eat between 10 to 20 pounds of shrimp, krill and small fish to gain one pound of weight. Farmed salmon gain weight much more easily since they don't burn up energy looking for their next meal. For every 3 to 4 pounds of fish based feed, they gain one pound.

So what goes into fish based feed

When salmon were first farmed the diets were primarily all fishmeal and oil--a natural diet, so to speak. Ten years ago this fell to about 80 percent as other feed sources were substituted. Today, on average, fishmeal and oil comprise about half the diet for farmed salmon. Vegetable meal and oil are finding their way into feeds steadily. These feed components, virtually free of PCBs, and offering salmon farmers an alternate and plentiful source of feed get lots of attention. But it's not an easy switch. There are multiple issues that have to be solved: palatability (meat eaters don't always like a lot of veggies), nutrition issues, keeping omega-3 fatty acid levels up, and more.

There are dozens of research projects and tens of millions of dollars spent by the industry on this each year. Each development in the science of salmon feeding research takes a great deal of time and effort, as the developments have to be tested and carefully monitored.

While some things, such as palatability, can be tested quickly, other things, such as rate of gain or maintenance of nutritional characteristics, take longer--sometimes over a year. New developments are tested with a great deal of scientific rigour because further developments rely on these results.

Unlike livestock and poultry, salmon are only given medicated feed if they are being treated for disease and only if under the direction of a veterinarian. In Canada, less than three percent of feed is medicated. Also, it is not used as a growth promoter or as a preventative treatment.

Salmon farming is a young industry but we have made remarkable strides in feeding salmon over the past 10 years. This is the major reason why PCB levels in our stocks are so low--on average 1/100 of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) tolerance. This is a big part of why farmed salmon is so affordable and why our fish are so rich in omega-3 fatty acids.

DID YOU KNOW

• Astaxanthin, which provides the color to both wild and farmed salmon, is a naturally occurring carotenoid, in the same family of nutrients as vitamin A. The other carotenoid used in salmon feed is canthaxanthin, which is found naturally in trout, mushrooms and other foods
• Advances in feed production are resulting in reducing the use of forage fish and in reducing exposure of the farmed fish to environmental contaminants such as PCBs