FIRST COURSE - "Bottoni di lago" (lake fish buttons)

Recipe for 4 people

Ingredients
200 g lake fish stuffing
300 g fresh pasta made with egg white
80 g cream of cauliflower
Reduced broth made from lake fish
Cooking juices from lake fish
Shrimp shell dust
Cauliflower grated with a microplane
Herbs or flowers

For the lake fish stuffing:
60 g burbot ("bottatrice")
60 g white fish fillets ("lavarello")
60 g trout
20 g smoked eel
20 g offal and eggs from the various fish
40 g butter
1 shallot
1 white onion
Salt, to taste

For the fresh pasta made with egg white:
200 g 00 flour
100 g egg whites

For the reduced broth made from lake fish:
1 stalk of celery
1 carrot
1 white onion
Fish bones and heads
2 bay leaves
1 clove of garlic
Enough water to cover

For the cauliflower cream:
1/2 cauliflower
40 g butter
1/2 white onion
Salt

Preparation
For the lake fish stuffing:/em>
Fillet and remove the spine from the lake fish, sauté the eggs and offal (internal organs) in butter. Sweat the butter on a black Gastronorm pan with pieces of onion and shallot, add the fish cut into chunks, add the offal, salt and cook at 100° for 1 hour. Drain and keep the cooking juices; grind the fish finely with a meat grinder to obtain a homogeneous mixture. Add salt to adjust flavour.

For the fresh pasta made with egg white:em>
Mix the ingredients in a planetary mixer until the dough is smooth, just as if you were making normal egg pasta. Let set in a vacuum pack for at least 2 hours, and then roll very thin.

For the reduced broth made from lake fish:
Brown the vegetables in butter, add the fish scraps and bones, and then cover with water and let cook on low heat to extract all of the flavours. Filter and reduce.

For the cauliflower cream:
Sauté the julienned onions in butter until they are soft, and then add the cauliflower pieces. Cook very slowly until very soft. Beat, add salt to adjust flavour, and put through a chinois.

Serving:
Cook the “buttons” in salted water then flavour them in a pan with the fish cooking juices. Use a spoon to distribute the cauliflower cream and the buttons, use the microplane to grate fresh cauliflower over the dish, pour 1 spoonful of fish broth over the buttons and lastly, garnish with herbs or flowers.