Getting a jump on the season

Local commercial salmon season starts later this week, and I, like many other folks, can hardly wait. Grilled, poached, roasted, broiled and encrusted, in pasta, salads and salmon cakes, I plan to enjoy them all.

It was with this anticipatory mind-set that I shopped for ingredients to test recipes for next’s week’s cover story on salmon. The market I went to — Berkeley Bowl — offered a wide selection, from fresh wild Alaskan King to a few farmed options (see accompanying story) since our local catch was still on the horizon.

My salmon recipe features fillets simply seasoned and cooked by your favorite method. The dill-mustard butter sauce almost gilds the lily, but the sauce’s tanginess replaces the de rigueur squeeze of lemon juice and its butteriness gives a touch of richness to the fillets.

Butter-based sauces can break if overheated. The emulsion of fat and other liquids separates and your sauce becomes unattractively thin and oily instead of remaining thick and lustrous. One trick to help keep the sauce emulsified is to add a little heavy cream and cornstarch with the wine-lemon juice reduction before whisking in any other additions and the butter.

In my sauce, I’ve included hints of mustard and dill — complementary flavors for salmon — to provide complexity to what is otherwise a simple lemony butter sauce.

This dish needs a rather rich white wine with enough acidity to counter the sauce. A balanced, slightly buttery, oaknuanced Chardonnay and richer Sauvignon Blanc will work well, though anything too lean will seem even leaner in comparison to the sauced salmon.