Seafood Simple: Salmon with Dill
I must admit something first. This isn’t my first recipe from Seafood Simple. In fact, I accidentally made this recipe once when I started working on an old family recipe for salmon without realizing there was no dijon mustard in the fridge. Just olive oil, dill, salt, pepper, and into the oven. Maybe a squeeze of fresh lemon at the end for some zing. With that said, the family recipe calls for fourteen minutes in an oven at 400 degrees, which, by Ripert’s standards, is practically burning it.
The reason I went for this recipe first was because it felt so familiar. Salmon can be found practically anywhere and I’ve made it a regular part of my weekly “whip something up in the kitchen after work” repertoire. If you cook up a bowl of rice and maybe a roasted veggie, you have a meal in 20 minutes. It’s not the chicken of the sea, but it’s pretty damn close. The fish is fairly easy to make and can be very forgiving if a mistake is made. I’ve been eating fourteen-minutes-at-400 salmon my entire life. It’s very much palatable at that temperature but after making Ripert’s version, it is a mistake, short and simple.
The equipment needed for this recipe is a baking dish and a metal skewer. The baking dish makes sense, but the metal skewer required some thinking. My mind immediately went to salmon fish-kabobs, which seems more apropos for a Red Lobster than Eric Ripert cookbook. That notion, thankfully, was wrong. Ripert calls for a metal skewer to be poked into the thickest part of the fish for five seconds after cooking. Once removed, it should feel warm to the touch against your wrist. If the metal skewer is warm, the fish is done.
This technique made me nervous. The recipe calls for an oven heated to 275 and a cook time of 15 - 18 minutes. From previous experience in the kitchen, salmon should be cooked through like chicken so the fact that this particular salmon came from an air sealed container from Key Foods for $5 further strained my nerves. But, as I’ve learned, Eric must be right and I have been wrong this entire time. The fish that emerged from my oven was juicy and fresh and melted on my tongue. The olive oil and dill complemented the fattiness of the fish nicely.
There are some helpful tricks Ripert adds to the recipe that takes the dish from good to great. First, the salmon and dill should rest in the fridge for an hour. I believe this is more for the fish’s reaction to cooking than serving as a marinade of sorts. Perhaps it firms up the skin and meat, but I’ll have to do more research on this. Second, at the lower temperature of 275 degrees the white fatty stuff, or albumen, remains in the fish, providing a silky flavor that coats your tongue. The combination of lower temperature and longer cooking time is what gives the fish its restaurant quality texture and taste.
Overall, I recommend this recipe to anyone who has an oven and wants to eat semi-restaurant quality fish. It is hard to mess up and even if a longer cook time produces that albumen at the bottom of the filet, the fish will still taste delicious. The dish has impressed friends with minimal effort; it is simple, delicious, and a great introduction to Ripert’s style of cooking.