Asian Salmon Burger with Green Bean Fries

Take the patty mix in order. The curry paste, soy and honey get mixed smooth before the fish goes anywhere near them — that's not fussiness, that's because curry paste doesn't dissolve evenly into cold raw fish; it clumps, and you end up with one bite that's all chilli and three bites that taste of nothing. Stir it into a loose sauce first and every strand of salmon gets an even coat. Same principle as marinating meat: season the liquid, not the solid.

Panko, not fresh breadcrumbs, in both the coating and the patty. Panko is bread dried and flaked rather than ground — it stays hollow and craggy instead of compacting into dense crumb, so it crisps without turning into a wall of fried starch. If you've only got ordinary breadcrumbs, use them, but go lighter — fresh breadcrumbs hold more moisture and will steam rather than crisp, and a soggy coating on a pan-fried patty is the single most common way this dish goes wrong. It's not the fish that lets you down here, it's the crumb.

On heat for the patties: "medium" means hot enough that the surface sears and sets within the first minute, because that sear is what's holding the patty together, not the egg. Egg is a binder for the raw mix, not a glue once it's cooking — the structural job in the pan belongs to the crust. Too low a heat and the outside stays soft while you wait for colour, so when you flip, it falls apart; this is also why you turn it once, with a proper spatula sliding flat under the whole thing, not lifted at an edge. If your crust hasn't set, no amount of careful turning saves you — the fix is heat, not technique.

Sesame oil for frying is there for flavour, not for its smoke point, which is actually lower than you'd want for a full searing heat — so if your pan runs hot, cut it with a neutral oil, anything with no smell of its own: sunflower, groundnut, even a mild rapeseed, which is what you'll find easiest in a British shop anyway. Pure sesame oil straight into a very hot pan will bitter before the patty's cooked through, and that bitterness tastes like burnt nuts, not like a mistake you can blame on the fish.

The dressing is just mayonnaise and crème fraîche carrying fish sauce, garlic, ginger and lime zest — crème fraîche because it has enough acidity and fat to stand up to fish sauce without curdling or turning watery the way single cream would. If you haven't got crème fraîche, soured cream does the same job; Greek yoghurt will too, though it's sharper and thinner, so hold back slightly on the lime. Grate the ginger finely rather than chopping it — a coarse chop gives you fibrous threads that sit unpleasantly on the tongue; a fine grate releases the juice into the dressing and leaves the pulp behind to melt into it.

One more thing worth saying plainly: patience is an ingredient here, same as the panko or the ginger. Don't rush the green beans out of the oven because they look done at twenty minutes — the crumb needs the full stretch to go from "crisp but pale" to properly golden, and pulling them early is the difference between a fry and a bean with crumbs stuck to it. This isn't a fast dish pretending to be fast. It's a Tuesday-night burger that takes a Sunday-roast kind of attention to the details, just not the time.

Four buns, four patties, serves four — don't stretch the mix to five portions thinking you'll save some fish, because the patty-to-bun ratio is what makes it a burger rather than a fish cake on bread, and a thin patty loses the bite that makes the dish work at all.