The secret to perfectly cooked salmon: Brining
Salmon is versatile, easy to find and quick to cook, so it’s no mystery why it makes its way onto so many dinner tables. While cooking it can be tricky — especially if you want your salmon to be nicely browned on the outside and moist, silky and tender on the inside — there are a couple of important steps to take that can make getting a delicious result almost foolproof.
Start by brining the salmon before cooking it, which solves more than one problem. First, it improves the texture. Giving it a soak in salt water helps ensure that the salmon has a nice flake but is also ultra-moist. Second, it infuses more flavor into the flesh. Third, it makes the salmon look better by reducing the amount of albumin (aka “the white stuff”) from seeping out of the flesh during the cooking process.
Of course, there are many ways to cook salmon, but I like the roasting method used in the recipe here because it achieves the previously mentioned “browned on the outside, moist on the inside” results.
It starts out in a smoking-hot oven, which kickstarts the browning process. The heat is then immediately turned down to a low temperature to complete the cooking process and preserve the salmon’s moisture.
In this recipe, I’m coating the salmon fillets with a mixture of honey and mustard, along with a crunchy pecan topping, both of which dial up the flavor/texture factors. But you could leave off the pecans or use pesto instead of the honey mustard.
The options are endless, so it’s easy to make this dish your own.