So I totally blanked on taking pictures of it (I know, I should always have my camera) but I wanted to throw up a recipe I made tonight for Recipe Tuesday. This one will give a lot of life to a piece of salmon. A word about salmon: always try your hardest to get wild-caught salmon. It makes an amazing amount of difference in the taste and freshness of the fish. Wild Sockeye salmon from Alaska is incredible and if you can find some that has been flash-frozen and brought to where you live, it’s a real treat. I use salmon filets for this recipe but it would probably work great for a salmon steak as well. Be sure to keep the skin on for this recipe; you can take the filet off the skin easily after cooking if you want. This recipe is basically just a dry-rub and should be applied to the salmon 2-3 hours before cooking.
Ingredients:
Wild salmon filets
Brown sugar
Sea salt
A lemon or two
Combine the brown sugar with the sea salt in the following proportions: about 70% brown sugar to 30% sea salt. Mix these up in a small bowl so that you have enough to coat all your filets, bottom and top. Apply the rub all over the filets on both the flesh and skin sides. The next step is to use either a zesting tool or a microplane/grater to put some nice lemon zest on the filets. For those that don’t know, lemon ‘zest’ is just ground lemon skin. You don’t need a whole lot of zest, just a light, even covering. Now cover the filets with plastic wrap and put in the fridge for 2-3 hours.
When you are ready to cook, preheat your oven to 400 and get a heavy fry pan hot at about an 8 in heat on a 10 point dial. Put a little olive oil in the pan and immediately put the filet in, skin side down, for 2 minutes. After 2 minutes is up, flip the filet and put the pan in the center of the preheated oven for 3-5 minutes depending on thickness. Don’t overcook salmon! It will lose a lot of its flavor if you do. Take the filets out of the oven and you can either take them off the skin and plate or leave the skin on and allow people the choice.
I like to accompany fish with a good rice dish like rice pilaf.
Hope you enjoy this recipe! Let me know in the comments if you give it a try. 🙂