How to Cook Salmon

(This Is Not About Cooking Salmon)

Tonight, I’m making salmon for supper.

This is a hit-or-miss dish for me as it’s easy to overcook—but when it’s too raw, that’s not quite right, either. Of course, there are entire schools of thought on how well one ought to cook salmon: ranging from nice and juicy to flaky dry. But in my view, you want to be able to taste the handiwork of the chef as well as the freshness of the food. It’s a delicate balance. A good salmon should taste like salmon, not honey and soy sauce and who knows what else. You don’t need unnecessarily complicated marinades for a food that when done right is pretty damn good by itself. It just needs a little help getting there sometimes, and the job of a chef is to complete that journey.

Salmon is like any dish that’s easy to not ruin but difficult to nail. Similar to making eggs, you are working with a handful of ingredients, trying to make sure every piece is working well with the greater whole. Even a bad omelet is not inedible, but a truly great one is hard to pull off. The same is true for fish. I could go on a rant about eggs, my favorite thing to cook and eat, but this is not about eggs. It’s not even about salmon. But I digress. Let’s stick to fish for now.

As with any seemingly simple dish, you want to start with the highest-quality ingredients possible, and try to not ruin them. That’s the secret to anything, really. Begin with the good stuff and keep it good for as long as you can. Don’t overwhelm the senses with too many directions when all you’re trying to do is lead your audience home. And in the case of this dish, that home is the sea. Your body is mostly water, anyway, so when you feed someone fish, it’s like a family reunion or something.

Salmon is both a freshwater and saltwater fish, which means it’s indecisive, just like people; but that also means it’s hardy. So this partnership between two gritty beings trying to make sense of their place in the world is the kind of creation that requires constraint. You’ve got to get everything in front of you and decide what belongs and what doesn’t. Of course, the better stuff you start with, the less you need to add—and the less that needs to go.

I love salmon, especially when all the flavors are dialed in. Like a great book, as soon as you finish it, you feel satisfied—not too much or too little of the good stuff, just enough to keep you hungry for more. It’s a good meal. To get there, we have to start simple and maintain that simplicity. Just as the hardest part of telling a story is finding one, making a good meal starts with where you get your food. Do your work, don’t skimp on the ingredients, and take us some place we’ve never been before but immediately recognize.

So this afternoon as my family and I were walking through the grocery store, I made my way to the seafood section and perused the selections. Noticing the price per pound on salmon had gone up, I asked the fishmonger what the deal was. “That’s because this is fresh,” he said. “It’s salmon season.” That explained why it was so dark, the deepest color I’d ever seen on a fish.

Well then, I thought to myself. Let the games begin.

This brings me to another important point: good salmon is not pink. It’s red. Bright orangish-red, to be exact. Not dark red like tuna, but a heavier hue than the pastel shade of pink you tend to see most places. And definitely darker than the blush-like baby color often designated as “salmon.” Good things go deep, and you can tell when someone has gone to great lengths to bring you something to remember, and when they haven’t. So we begin with fresh, wild-caught salmon. Because you want to taste the ocean and the river, the struggle the fish went through to get back to its spawning grounds—not your cousin Jimmy’s upstate farm.

How do you prepare something you could feasibly eat raw? You get down to its essence. It should be interesting and delicious all on its own. Your job is to remove the distractions. In this case, that’s the water. You’ve got to dry the fish, removing all excess moisture. There are likely more sophisticated ways to do this, but I just pat it with a paper towel. Before I get to work, I want to remove all the stuff that is not the salmon. I want to taste the ocean in the fish, not on it. Don’t pollute your meal with its surroundings; focus on what is inside it. Soon, it will be inside you, so you want to keep this exchange holy and sacred, free from impurity.

After you dry the fish, season it. Typically, I splash a little bit of olive oil on it, coating both the scaly and fleshy sides. Then, I add salt and pepper. Salt, it was once said to me, is not a spice but a mineral—it changes the chemical composition of the food. This is true when salt is applied to any meat or fish, as well as butter and eggs. Personally, I am a fan of pre-salting your scrambled eggs, as I am told it prevents “weeping.” I can’t tell this for sure as I’ve never done adequate split tests on the claim, but it seems to work for me, and it’s fun to see the salt change the state of the eggy concoction, turning it from yellowish-orange to a deep amber within about fifteen minutes. Anyway, I promised to not make this about eggs, so… moving on. Knowing how to use what you’re working with is the mark of any skilled craftsperson, even and especially when that comes to sprinkling salt on a filet of fish.

So now you’ve got a pat-dried salmon, slathered in olive oil with salt and pepper sprinkled on top. Next, you want to squeeze a little lemon on it, maybe half a lemon, sometimes the whole thing. Just depends on how frisky you feel. I’ve cooked this dish with and without the lemon and strongly prefer it with. If nothing else, it’s fun to see the citrus start changing the color of the flesh, cooking it with the heat of the acid. Seeing how little choices like this affect our creations is a small reward for the otherwise thankless job of a scratch cook. I am not sure if this is the right way to do it, but it tastes good, and often your own experience is all the wisdom you need.

Then comes the hard part. Nothing. You have to wait, usually thirty to forty minutes at least, letting your food sit. Out in the open, on a plate, exposed to the elements, absorbing everything you added to it. Oil. Salt. Pepper. Lemon. The little bits are sinking into the larger part. It’s becoming something else. Now, we are no longer preparing food—we are cooking. Creating something new. Working with the same stuff so many before us have had access to. But in this moment, with these ingredients, we are making something new. Sure, it’s been done before, even quite a bit like this, but never exactly how we are doing it today. Not with that squeeze of lemon and that crack of pepper and that glug of oil.

No one has ever made salmon exactly this way before. And no one ever will.

The cooking of the fish is the easy part. You just have to be patient, like with life. If you wait without complaint, while continuing to pay attention, it all works out. You can throw the salmon on a medium-heat frying pan with plenty of olive oil, skin side down, and just let it do what it does. Cook it for several minutes like this, giving the fish a little push at first to ensure the skin gets nice and crunchy from the oiled pan. It will crackle and pop but shouldn’t burn. Just leave it skin-side down until the top part starts to change color around the edges, bubbling with little white bits of fat. If you push it with your finger and it feels firm but not too squishy, it’s probably close to done. It really comes down to how you like it. In general, err on the side of finishing before you think it’s ready. That’s a good rule overall.

Then flip the fish, cooking it flesh-side down for another minute.

Or even simpler: just throw it on the grill. Depending on the type of grill you have, you might not even need to flip it (I use a ceramic grill which functions as an outdoor oven, so it cooks pretty evenly). Regardless, keep the process simple. No fancy cedar boards. No crazy spices. You aren’t trying to taste the forest here, just the sea and the thing that swims in it. This is a simple process that is difficult to master.

Then serve.

Of course, other cooks will have their own ideas, and I wish them well. But this approach works for me and the people I am responsible for feeding. My job isn’t to follow someone else’s recipe. It’s to find what feels right and repeat the process until it gets a little better every time. It’s a process of learning from inevitable mistakes and trying again, a little differently with each attempt. I am always starting over, using the same stuff in new ways, adjusting for some variable I didn’t account for last time. Ever the apprentice, I let the ingredients and kitchen teach me what they have to offer. The lessons are never the same twice, the experience always an adventure.

This is cooking. We start with what’s good, following the steps that work, and try to not over-complicate any of it, letting the process unfold the way that it wants. And of course, this is about a lot more than cooking—but I’ll let you figure that part out for yourself.

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P.S. If you want an actual recipe for cooking salmon, this one never disappoints (I love almost every recipe J. Kenji does, and his cookbook is a must for any curious cook). I ended up throwing mine on the grill, and it was the best salmon I’ve ever made at home. If you want more food writings, I love

Ella Risbridger

’s column on life and food, as well as her beautifully illustrated cookbook Midnight Chicken (the titular recipe is a semi-regular staple in our home).

P.P.S. Oh, and be sure to check out the audio essay version of this piece, as I spent way too long trying to get the recording right. Still not happy with it, but I had to ship something. Let me know if you want more of that sort of thing, and I’ll do my best.

P.P.P.S. (I know, it’s getting excessive, but bear with me here.) If you are enjoying these essays, you can show your support by subscribing at whatever level makes sense for you. I appreciate the encouragement as I am experimenting with the kind of writing I’ve always wanted to do. Wherever this leads, I promise to take you with me.