Best salmon recipes for every taste
Salmon and cooking
Wild Atlantic salmon is leaner and fuller-flavoured than farmed salmon, which is rich in fat and has a more delicate flavour. Preference for lean or fatty salmon is generally a personal choice, as both are good in culinary terms. I love Atlantic salmon for smoking, as its fat adds moisture and improves the texture and mouthful of the finished product. But for cured salmon, or gravlax, I tend to choose wild-caught Pacific salmon over its Atlantic cousin (although I've made scores of delicious sides of gravlax from Atlantic salmon, too). Other cooks might say the exact opposite.
In general cooking, both are excellent, but one should take extra care not to overcook leaner Pacific or wild Atlantic salmon. All salmon is done when the centre of the meat is just no longer or barely translucent and still full of moisture. Some people (I am often one of them) like the centre to retain just a touch of rawness.
Salmon recipes
Everyone has his or her own favourite salmon recipe, and I'd like to share some of mine with you. An uncommon style of cooking salmon, which many people find surprising but cooks the fish to perfection, is poaching it in olive oil. Almost none of the oil is absorbed by the fish, but it flavours the flesh and leaves it meltingly tender. See Confit-Style Salmon for a recipe using that method. Perhaps no other fish is as good poached as salmon, hot or cold, as in Poached Salmon on Fennel Salad.
Because of its lovely flavour, very little is needed to gild the lily with salmon. A fabulously simple sauce can be all that's needed for a gourmet dinner dish that can be made in minutes, such as Salmon with Coriander Oil, a real personal favourite. Conversely, the full flavour of the fish means it can stand up to stronger-flavoured sauces, as in Salmon in Lemon-Olive Sauce or Salmon with Black Bean Sauce. Salmon can even be the star of choucroute, the Alsace sauerkraut specialty.
Visual appeal and taste go hand in hand. The beautiful pink colour of cooked salmon can play wonderfully well with green, for a fresh, spring look, as in Salmon with Pea and Mint Purée, which (when made with frozen peas) can bring a hint of spring to even the most grey March day. So brighten your dinner plates with this wonderfully versatile and healthy fish!
You'll get a great dose of omega-3 fatty acids in any dish featuring salmon, so bring on the fish!
Andrew Chase is Homemakers Magazine's food editor, the author of The Asian Bistro Cookbook (Robert Rose, 1997), The Blender Bible (Robert Rose, 2005) and co-author of 400 Blender Cocktails: Sensational Alcoholic And Non-alcoholic Cocktail Recipes (Robert Rose, 2006). Subscribe to Homemakers Magazine and don't miss any of Andrew's recipes and menus.
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