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Salmon is a fish a lot of people get wrong, but it's so simple and easy to cook at home. Just a few key things you got to do. One, get a really crispy skin. Two, don't overcook it. Three, make a really delicious sauce that pairs with it. You do not need to be intimidated by cooking fish at home. My name's Ed Schamanski and today we're going to make my perfect version of pan-roasted salmon. All right, we have a beautiful side of salmon in front of us. So, from this we're going to cut a couple of portions so we can make dinner for two. As you see, there are two main parts of the fish. This side, the belly side, which
is a little bit thinner, a little bit fattier. Then you have the loin side on this side, which is thicker and will take longer to cook, but it's a little bit leaner. Couple of tips that are very important that you follow if you're making salmon at home. Number one, when it's in your fridge, leave it skin side up. What that'll do is allow air to circulate over the skin and dry it out quicker. If it was skin side down, moisture would fall off into the skin. And moisture is the enemy of a crispy skin. The next thing is to inspect our product. Make sure it's good and smells and looks delicious. We want it to smell clean, like the sea. We do not want it to smell fishy. That's a bad sign. Then
you call your fishmonger and say, "What the hell, man?" This smells delicious. It smells like a wolf, like being right by the sea. Another thing to check for is the color and appearance of the salmon. We want it to be quite bright and shiny. We don't want it to look gray or dull or matte in color, both for the skin side, but also for the flesh side. Lastly, we want it to have a nice firmness to it. We don't want spongy, soft salmon. That's a pretty bad sign that it's old and started to decay on the inside. See this? If I push it, it pushes back. That's a great sign. This is a nice specimen. We're going to check briefly for scales. You can do that just by running your fingers
against the salmon upwards. The scales run from the head down to the tail. There are no scales coming off. This is a nicely scaled piece of fish. It's ready now to be portioned, and then we can cook it. Now, we have two options when portioning it. One is to portion it across. That's the way you see it at home when you get both the belly and the loin. The other way is to portion it as the belly is one piece and the loin is another piece. When we're at the restaurants and you see those perfect cubes of fish, that's the way we do it there. I like to do it for the home cook cross the salmon. This is the best way to make sure you get even portions for everyone at the dinner table. Make one nice cut
and go all the way back and you can apply little pressure and your salmon will separate nicely. Use the sharpest knife you have. Use the biggest knife you have. You do not want to chainsaw through your salmon. Now, if you get the portion size wrong, it's not the end of the world unless the Michelin inspector is there looking for you. And you can see really nicely here the fatty belly here and then the leaner loin. From now on, we're going to keep them only facing the skin side up so we can keep it really dry. And before we start cooking it, I'm actually going to blot it with a paper towel. Moisture really is the enemy of a crispy skin. So, the drier we can get this, the better it'll crisp up.
If you throw it in a pan without blotting it dry, the danger here is that moisture from the skin gets into the fat that you're cooking it in the pan with and gives you this soggy sort of flaccid skin that's not very tasty at all. Blot. Nice dry salmon. Now, we are ready to prepare our vegetables. We're going to prepare the rest of our mise en place. Mise en place means having all our preparation ready to go. We do not want to be cooking salmon and then over here cutting shallots and then back over there basting salmon. Prepare everything, move it to the stove, cook everything and then sit down with a nice bottle of wine and eat
dinner. So, we'll start by chopping up our shallots and our garlic. You call these shallots in America. And I've been caught saying that on camera on accident. So, now I'm very careful to say it the English way. What's the right way to say it? Shallots. Kind of Also making today is a lemon caper brown butter sauce. Quintessentially French, very delicious, very simple. Shouldn't be afraid of making brown butter sauces at home at all. Now, separately from that on the side, we're going to cook some beautiful spinach with some Dijon mustard and some garlic and some shallots. Give it a nice vibrant hearty green that pairs really nicely with that fatty salmon. Shallots are sweeter than
onions. And the sweetness of the shallots, I think, is a lovely compliment to the irony flavor of the spinach. It'll all go really nicely as a great flavor complement to the salmon. So, these we're going to cook in a little bit of butter before we add the spinach. Now, we'll do a little bit of garlic, too. Two cloves of garlic, I think is plenty for two pieces of salmon. You have to use fresh whole garlic. Like, the peeled garlic should be in prison. You shouldn't be allowed to buy pre-peeled garlic, I don't think. All right, now to prep our spinach. So, we're going to take it off the stem. We do that by pinching and pulling. Spinach and salmon are very friendly companions. You'll see when we cook it down in the pan, this will
shrink to almost nothing. This is maybe not even enough for two people to share. And this spinach will come over to the stove with us. Now, we're going to chop our parsley. We'll roll it up a little bit. Parsley adds this beautiful herby brightness to it. You almost won't find a recipe at one of my restaurants without some sort of freshly chopped herb. Really is like the classic companion to the brown butter. A little bit of stem never hurt anyone. There's the Snoop Dogg rules in restaurants where there's no stems and no seeds in your herbs when you're picking them. And you see, the parsley is relatively roughly chopped. There's a really nice quote from a famous British
chef. It says you should chop it just enough to tame it. And now we have our ingredients ready and prepared. Let's go to the stove. When it comes to cooking salmon, the number one thing with all cooking in general, do not be afraid of your pans. Do not be afraid of the heat. Do not be afraid of your ingredients. If you cook timidly, your dishes will taste timid and a bit weak and not very interesting. But, cook bravely and you'll be rewarded with delicious food. We're going to cook this in a cast iron. This is a great heavy bottom pot for cooking things that you want to get a really nice crust on. Now, you do not need to use a cast iron.
You can use a nonstick. You can use a stainless steel pan. First step, get our pan nice and hot. You do not want to start your salmon in a cold pan. Then, we're going to season the salmon from a height. And we do that so that the salt can spread evenly. If this looks like a lot of salt, it isn't. Same thing on the other side. Season both sides of the fish. You see, by doing it from a height, we get a nice even coating. Now, how do you know when your pan is hot? You use your senses. You put your hand near it. If you can do this for a long time, your pan is not very hot yet. One thing we don't want to do is crowd our pan with salmon. It cools the pan down so quickly that you can't get a
nice sear on it. This is starting to get nice and hot. Now, we're going to add our olive oil. We use an unflavored oil or lightly flavored oil. We don't want it to smoke too much when it goes in the pan, but we do need it to get hot and not take on an acrid flavor. We use a nice amount. We want to cover the base of the pan in the oil. You see, it's starting to shimmer. That's a good sign that the oil is hot. Now, we're going to turn the heat down a little bit, and it's time to add our salmon. Overall, start to finish, this is less than 10 minutes.
Now, if it does not make that noise when you put it in the pan, your pan is not hot enough. Straight away in the pan, I can move this fish around, right? It is not sticking. That is because we got the pan hot, and it's because we got the skin dry. Now, here's a nice little technique. We want the skin to be evenly brown. So, to do so, we're going to apply pressure from our fingers onto the salmon so that it's in even contact with the pan. This is a like restaurant-level tip now. You will feel little bubbles start to hit against your finger from the inside of the salmon. They're the air pockets bubbling up to touch your fingers. Now, they make weights you can use to put on top of your salmon if
you're really averse to touching your food. Your fingers work just fine. So, we'll pick it up and start to see it. We're starting to get a little bit of color on our salmon. This is a good sign. We have a ways to go here. You don't really want to rush this process. The salmon is starting to look cooked up from the bottom, not quite on top. This side is still very much raw in the middle here. So, we're going to start now by basting the thicker side. We're going to bring the pan towards me and use some of the oil that pools at the bottom to cook the top side of the salmon without ever having the salmon come into contact with the bottom of the
pan. This is a way to add heat to the salmon was allowing the whole time we're cooking the fish, the skin is in contact with the pan. It means that the skin is never not getting crispy. The whole time this is getting nice and crispy. You see at the top now, this color change is the process of cooking the salmon. So by not flipping it, by just using a spoon and hot oil, we're getting nicely cooked salmon on the top and we're ensuring that it's cooking nice and evenly. I think the ideal doneness for salmon is when it has a nice crispy skin and has a little bit of pink left in the middle. Now you can choose to do that by the amount of time you baste it. You baste it for longer, you cook it more on top.
If you like your salmon rare, you could stop now. The outside is set, the inside is going to still be pretty rare at this stage. I'm going to cook it all the way through for you. Both methods are good. It depends what you want in your fish. Now here be careful cuz this top is hot. We're going to pick up our salmon and look at our skin. You see how nicely evenly golden brown that is? Nice and crusty. Now here's an interesting step. Before I add the butter, I'm going to remove some of the oil from the pan. I want to remove the oil so that the sauce tastes more like butter and less like oil. I don't want it to be too fatty.
The salmon is evenly cooked and very importantly, it's all crispy. It's not like some parts are crispy and the others are splodgy. It's lovely to have the salmon resting here for a little bit. One thing people don't do at home is rest their fish. You all know to rest your steaks and other proteins. It's the same with fish, too. You cook it first and then you let it rest to allow it to reabsorb some of the moisture that's lost in the cooking process and to let the muscle structure soften a little bit so that it's more tender when you eat it. So I'm going to let the salmon rest and we're going to start the sauce.
We're going to make a brown butter, lemon, and caper sauce. This is going to happen quite quickly. Do not be afraid of your butter. We're using unsalted butter from the best cow's butter you can find. The butter is the sauce, so that's where the flavor comes in. A brown butter is made just by cooking butter in a pan until it starts to caramelize some of the milk solids and they start to go nut brown. They call it beurre noisette in French cuz it smells like hazelnuts. Which I'm allergic to. But not to brown butter. You see all of this beautiful foaming butter? Really smells so great. It's such a natural pairing with fish. You can make a different sauce without caramelizing the butter. It's called a beurre blanc.
Means a white butter sauce. I love brown butter with salmon though. Now in a black bottom pan, it's harder to tell when your butter is perfectly nut brown because the bottom is dark. If you want to do this slightly easier, you can do it in a separate pan that has a stainless steel bottom to it. To do this, we kind of have to hold it up in our spoon to see. And when we start to have a little bit of the color we're looking for, we're going to add our capers. And now what they'll do is stop the cooking process cuz there's moisture in them. You hear that fizzle up? Capers are these delicious little salty nuggets and they bring this brininess and this saltiness to the butter. So because we were cooking a fat and we added a
liquid, that stops the fat from caramelizing anymore. Now we're going to add a nice big squeeze of lemon juice. Lots of acidity. We're going to add a tiny splash of white wine. The lemon and the wine come together to create this really flavorful sauce. So the lemon and the white wine arrest the cooking process the same way the capers do. By adding liquid into a caramelizing fat, you cool the temperature of the fat down instantly and that stops it from continuing to brown. I'm going to move this sauce to a different pan. We'll save our lemony capery sauce over here. We'll come back to that later. Now we're going to cook our spinach. So to do that, we'll add a
nice dollop of fresh butter. And as that butter is melting, we're going to cook our shallots and our garlic in with us. And when they go in the pan, we'll add a little bit of salt straight away. And you want to add the salt to pull out some of the moisture in the shallots and the garlic and to start the cooking process. We are not looking for sort of deeply caramelized. We're just looking to remove some of the raw flavor. We're keeping all the flavors together. So we started this in one pan, we're going to finish it in one pan. We get a little bit of cook on these shallots and this garlic and starts to smell aromatic.
This is like the magic trick for restaurants when you walk in and it smells like onions and garlic or shallots and garlic you'll say, "Oh, it's so good. What's cooking?" It's just shallots and garlic. We're going to add our spinach in. The irony flavor of spinach works really nicely with the fatty richness of the salmon. This looks like a lot of spinach but it really isn't. It's going to cook down really quickly. We're going to add a tiny bit of salt. We're just going to let moisture do its natural thing here. You could put a lid on this and it'll happen quicker but just by letting the spinach come into contact with the pan, it starts to wilt so quickly. You don't want to over wilt your spinach too much.
You just want to cook it down and let it absorb all these flavors and you don't want raw spinach at least not for this preparation. We're now going to add a glug of white wine to this. Any dry white wine will do. You don't want to use anything too sweet. Now our spinach is coming down. It's starting to look delicious. I'm going to add a nice big dollop of Dijon mustard to this too. Mustard and salmon and spinach are all really friendly flavors together. I'll sort of stir that in. We'll finish it with a little bit of lemon juice, a little bit of cracked pepper. The lemon adds a really nice brightness and
acidity to this. Pepper is just a tiny bit of spiciness. Balances out against some of the richness of the flavors of the salmon and the brown butter sauce. Spinach is done when it stops shrinking in size. It's not going to get any smaller than this and it's now fully cooked all the way through. We'll turn our heat off. We'll set that to the side. Our brown butter sauce. Now the one thing we didn't add to this was our parsley. The reason we don't add that earlier is because it will go brown. A nice bright green herb should stay green so we like to add that at the end and
we'll do it when the sauce is not too hot but it should still be warm. So now I'll just bring this together. Now we're ready to go to the plate. Really simple dish so we just have to sort of slop it on the plate in an elegant manner. Take our spinach and leave it a nice little pool. We'll take our crispy skin salmon with our fish back, just lay it elegantly next to the spinach and then take our caper and brown butter sauce and we spent all this time making sure the skin is nice and crispy. So, we don't want a
sauce on top of the skin, you know, this is crispy still. So, we'll go our sauce all around the dish. We put some on top of our spinach, some all around and we're sort of swirling it together so I get all of the flavors of both the salmon and the parsley and the capers and the lemon and then that luscious brown butter. And you should I think have a nice crusty baguette next to the dinner table when you're eating this. You can soak up all of those juices. That is our crispy skin salmon with spinach, brown butter and capers. This beautiful salmon is nice and evenly cooked on the inside, nice and pink still.
I take a piece of the belly off, mix it with the caper sauce. Mhm, really high quality fish, crispy skin and this nut buttery sauce. There are no nuts in it by the way. Sort of really unctuous, rich flavor and then the mustardy spinach cuts through the richness of the salmon. Really beautiful. Try a little bit from this side, too. This is a perfect weeknight dinner for two in 20 minutes and this comes together so quickly and it's so simple and it shouldn't be intimidating. Salmon is such a versatile fish. It can be used in this preparation and in hundreds of others. It's a really delicious, nutritious way to eat.
