Our new favorite clam chowder. Photo by Daniel Norman | IST.

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November 2007
Last Updated April 2012

Product Reviews / Main Nibbles / Fish, Seafood & Caviar

Bar Harbor Seafood

Page 2: Gourmet Canned Seafood & Newburg Sauce

This is page 2 of a three-page article. Click on the black links below to visit the other pages.

Fancy Canned Seafood

Canned clams, mussels and lobster meat are the best of their kind. If you use canned seafood for chowder, lobster rolls, pasta dishes, sauces and soups, we can recommend them. The meat is tender, and the packing liquid so delicious, we drank it all. We personally only cook with fresh seafood, and there’s a world of difference in flavor. We were, however, enamored by the can of lobster meat: two small claws and assorted bits of meat. We made lobster mashed potatoes for two, mashing the bits in with the potatoes and inserting the claws as plumes in the top of each mound. It was impressive!

Lobster Newburg and Maine lobster meat. Photo by Constance DeSwaan | THE NIBBLE.

This is the only shelf-stable (non-refrigerated) Maine lobster in the U.S. However delighted we were to receive this as a gift, for $19.95, it isn’t a lot of lobster meat. If money is no issue in your home, load up! In our home, we need to stretch our lobster dollar, so we look for bargains in fresh or frozen tails, which are closer to fresh lobster flavor.

Newburg Sauce

The Newburg Sauce was the least interesting of the products to us, because it is made with canola oil and milk—not the cream we’d use to make our own Newburg Sauce. While the label indicates sherry as an ingredient, it’s not discernable—it needs to be added at the end, right before taking the sauce of the stove, or the flavor will cook out. We really want to taste the sherry in our Newburg Sauce, not just a hint, so we found ourselves adding 1/4 cup of sherry to the 10-ounce can to get it to our satisfaction (plus several grinds of fresh nutmeg). That’s not a complaint—it’s to be expected with a canned product; our problem was that the canola oil couldn’t deliver the kind of richness that our own cream-and-egg Newburg Sauce recipe does.

Still, people who don’t want to invest the time making a Newburg Sauce from scratch can use this for a base. We used it to create “Eggs Newburg,” an easy and impressive brunch dish with poached eggs atop poached salmon. You can use smoked salmon on an English muffin as well.

Eggs Newburg Recipe

The classic breakfast favorite, Eggs Benedict, consists of an English muffin topped with Canadian bacon, a poached egg and hollandaise sauce. Some historians suggest that the dish may be a traditional French dish, œufs bénédictine; but here is the real history of Eggs Benedict.

In this recipe, a brandade (a purée of salt cod and potatoes) is spread on triangles of fried bread, topped with a poached egg and sauced with hollandaise. Eggs Newburg, a further evolution of both concepts, was developed in THE NIBBLE kitchen.

1. Toast an English muffin, add poached salmon or a slice of smoked salmon, then the poached egg. Top with Newburg Sauce.
2. If you have a boiled shrimp, use it to crown the top.
3. Snip fresh parsley, chives or thyme in a pretty pattern around the plate.
4. If you don’t have a shrimp to garnish the top of the eggs, use a sprig of thyme or parsley or two cuts of chives in an “X” pattern to garnish.

This was a welcome change from Eggs Benedict, and much easier than making hollandaise sauce from scratch.

But for a truly exquisite Newburg Sauce for dinner, you have to do it the hard way, starting with a white sauce (cream sauce). Add an egg yolk, sherry, brandy, nutmeg and cayenne. You’ll see many variations of Newburg Sauce that include minced onions, tomato paste, thyme and other ingredients, but this is the classic.

Continue To Page 3: Herring, Kippers & Mackerel

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