Wow, has it really been over three weeks since my last post?
Sorry about that! As a consolation, I'm posting one of my absolute best recipes of all time.
I started making this salmon many years ago. As most of my recipes are, it's pretty simple and quick to put together. Over time it has become a family favorite (even my dad, who professes to hate salmon, will eat it). My mom has asked me to make this salmon with rice and peas (and sometimes roasted butternut squash!*) for her birthday dinner a few times, and my brother always asks for the meal when we come home from school (he's currently a sophomore at UVA). We've started calling it Joey's Salmon, after my brother, because it's his favorite meal that I make.
Personally, there are a lot of ways to cook salmon that I really am not a fan of. I don't really like that salmon is still pink when you eat it, and that's one of the reasons this recipe is so good – the Asian marinade caramelizes into a beautiful sear. If you ask me, the best way to cook fish is to get a nice sear on it, otherwise it can end up being a mushy, texture-less mess. This is actual how I cook almost all protein:
1. Put oil in the pan over medium high heat, and get it hot.
2. Add anything yo uwant to caramelize, like onions or peppers.
3. Add the protein, and don't move it for 3-5 minutes (depending on how thick the meat/fish is). Seriously, don't poke at it, turn it over, move it around in the pan, anything. Keep an eye on it and make sure you don't smell anything burning (move the onions/peppers/other things around so they don't burn), but leave the protein where it is. You want it to get a nice sear, and it won't do that if you move it around.
4. Once it gets nice and caramelized, it will be easy to remove from the pan, so after a few minutes you can lift up a side to see how it longs/how easy it is to remove. If it isn't sticking, flip it over.
5. Let is sear on this side for a little less long, maybe 2-4 minutes. Once you feel like it's getting a good sear (and this might take a little practice, but I promise it will feel natural after a few tries), you can move to phase 2: cooking the meat through.
6. I never used to like cooking chicken because I was always afraid that I wouldn't cook it through. This is how to remedy that (and it's good thing, because chicken is a base of at least a third of the recipes I've seen). Add some kind of liquid to deglaze the pan. Deglazing means you do just that: add liquid, which can then be used to scrape the good caramelization off the bottom of the pan, making essentially a pan sauce. It also is going to help the meat cook through. At the point you want to turn the heat down to low, cover the pan, and let it simmer for a few minutes (like 5). Here is where you want to check that the meat is cooking through, and you can move it around as you please so everything cooks evenly.
I love this method because searing the protein gives it such amazing flavor, but cooking on only high heat (necessary for searing) can mean that a thick piece of chicken or fish won't cook through before the outside burns. This gives you the best of both worlds.
So here is a recipe to implement your newly learned cooking method. This salmon is sweet, salty, and filled with umami – the fifth taste, representing savory foods. (A fun fact about taste buds, since I haven't talked science in a while: most of us have learned in school that there are regions on the tongue for different taste buds: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. This is actually a myth: each of the taste buds scattered over the tongue is capable of sensing all tastes, but specialized cells within each taste bud are tuned to each of the five tastes, including savory/umami. So it isn't true that you can only taste sweet things on the tip of your tongue, or bitter in the very back. It just has to do with how your brain responds to the messages it gets from your taste buds.)
Joey's Salmon
Serves 6
Ingredients
1/4 cup soy sauce (use gluten free if you need it)
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup orange juice
2 tablespoons freshly grated ginger
1 tablespoon garlic
2 pounds salmon
1 teaspoon olive oil
Directions
1. Mix all ingredients except salmon in a plastic bag. If necessary, you can microwave the honey for about 10 seconds before adding it so that it mixes well. Add the salmon and marinate for up to two hours.
2. Using a grill pan or a nonstick saucepan, heat olive oil over medium high heat. Once the pan is hot, add the salmon, and let it caramelize on that side, about 5 minutes. Flip the salmon and let it caramelize on the second side, about 3-5 minutes.
3. Turn down to low heat. Add the rest of the marinade from the bag and cover. Let the salmon cook through, moving it around the pan and stirring the marinade until it thickens and gets darker in color but doesn't burn.
4. Serve immediately with rice and vegetables.
*Pick up one of those bags of cubed butternut squash from Trader Joe's, in the refrigerated section usually next to the salad greens. Its $2, and while it's not as cost effective as buying a whole butternut squash and cutting it yourself, you'll save a lot of time and hardship. Butternut is one of my least favorite things to chop, and that's coming from a girl who was and is a long-time lover of chopping vegetables (I don't think it is really that weird to love chopping vegetables right? It started in my "sous chef" days cooking alongside my dad, where the task I could most help with was cutting up all the veggies. It is somewhere between nostalgia and enjoying the repetitive task as a time to think that makes me still love it today. Also great catharsis.) Anyway, get one of these bags (or two) if you are short on time or just don't feel like cutting a squash, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and put on the top rack of the oven at 400 degrees F. You'll be able to tell when it's done because it will start getting golden brown after about 30 minutes. I know I talk about roasted vegetables a lot; go make some. It's worth it.