How To Make Perfect Pan Fried Salmon

so over my last 18 years of professional cooking experience i have cooked salmon so many different ways but this technique i'm about to show you today is the one i keep coming back to over and over and over again it's my go-to salmon recipe and by the end of this video i really hope you are on board with the term bacon of the seed because straight up that's what salmon skin is there's no time to waste my friends now let's go now first off what kind of salmon should you use for years i've been buying this salmon from schooner bay i think they do a really good job of farming salmon and it just has that right amount of fat content in it for me to make it really tender you know king salmon is also great and if you can find sockeye salmon that has a decent amount of fat in it that's awesome for me the most important thing is fat content here because i know a lot of wild salmon might be more nutritious but they are always just so freaking lean they are shredded like bruce lee of the rivers man and without that fat you end up with dry fish pretty much no matter what so here i have a side of salmon it's not a complete side but it's enough and so you see this portion right here with all that extra fat my favorite piece that is the belly of the salmon and you might also be able to see how thin it is compared to this part right so what i would recommend is simply taking this belly off and of course i'm still gonna cook this but it's gonna be done in less than half the time that it takes for this big piece to cook so i separate it and you can see on this salmon this little cartilage i think it is right here this white line it's not that bad on this specific piece of fish but i do like to take it out be careful when you do this i'm putting a little pressure on this side and i'm just going to guide down with the tip of my knife keeping that pressure on the other side like so and then i'll just do the same thing going the other way and from there kind of pull that out with the knife now that is all out so there's no hard bits in the fish another thing is to feel for bones your fishmonger will try to do the best job they can but sometimes a bone is missed so i'm just feeling down where they remove these pin bones and i'm just feeling that there's no bones there which there isn't it did a good job now another thing and this is kind of my biggest pet peeve is making sure the fish is properly scaled i can look at this right now and see that it is it's actually really nicely done but if it wasn't you're gonna run a knife along the back like so this can also be a good idea just to get rid of some of the moisture you can see it start building up on the knife here when you go to buy your salmon just ask the person is this fish scale and if not ask them to scale it for you if you don't want to do it at home because it can make a big mess as the scales just go flying everywhere and they'll stick to your skin for like three months and then you'll find it it's weird they're weird they're sticky little things now before slicing this up i'm just gonna try to get off as much moisture as possible just using a little paper towel here and this is how you're really going to get the crispiest skin you know you could also dry age the fish that's a whole nother topic for a really crispy skin but you don't need to do that to get crispy skin so that's dry as i can possibly get it with this paper towel and now we'll just slice it into nice pieces i like a kind of a bigger piece i don't want to go skimpy with it so i'll get four portions out of this piece of fish easy as that and if you ask me i do think you should temper fish as well meaning pull it out of the fridge prior to cooking but you don't need to temper it as long as you would like a big thick ribeye steak or something right so i only do these about 20-30 minutes and they're good to go next thing i like to do and you don't need to do this either is to score the fish but you'll see why at the end of the video that i do this so i'm doing it like a sushi roll right right through the middle there and then those halves in half like so and this is going to play into my bacon of the sea technique which you will see in a bit now i add a very light coating of oil that's just avocado oil you can really use whatever kind of oil you like and for me that just acts like a binder right so it helps this salt that i'm putting on right now stick which is the next step we're just gonna salt this fish nicely all the way around and i did the exact same thing with the belly here except i did not score the skin since it's so thin it's gonna cook so fast we don't really need to do that so i'm just using a steel pan here if you're not comfortable cooking in steel pans non-stick will do just fine i'm not gonna judge you for it and the heat here is between low and medium but a tiny bit closer to the medium side that's pretty important salmon skin is a little more sensitive than a lot of other fish and can burn pretty quick so you don't want the heat too high now a little bit of cooking oil going in this is just avocado oil any kind of neutral oil will do all right here we go fish in whenever you're putting any kind of protein into a pan lay it away from you so if it splashes oil it goes over there and not onto you [Music] and also as soon as that goes in the pan listen just a slight pressure on the fish not enough to smash or damage the flesh in any way but just giving that skin a really good contact to the pan you can even use these little fish weights you'll see in professional kitchens that sets over the fish and puts a little weight on it those work really well actually want to get one and keep in mind here because we're going to baste this fish in the end with a little bit of butter it is going to carry overcook so much more meaning when i take it off the heat it's gonna keep rising in temperature if you're just baking salmon in the oven or just cooking it normally you might want to pull it at 120 degrees fahrenheit but because i'm basting and because of all that extra heat i'm going to pull this between 105 and 110 degrees fahrenheit and it's gonna come up to a beautiful medium temperature that's about how i like my salmon even medium rare is good too but anywhere between medium rare and medium is nice for me the fish is really tender okay it's been about three minutes right now and if you can see right here it's cooked about a third of the way up through the fish this is when we want to flip it and i like to take my spatula turn it upside down so that curvature is going down and then get under the fish like this and just scrape and flip [Music] perfect and there we have some glorious looking skin now at this point i'm turning the heat all the way down to low i'm just adding about a teaspoon of butter and i'm going to wait for that butter to begin foaming before i base you don't want to base too early that's good nice and hot bubbly now we can start basting our fish you can also add some thyme or garlic or whatever you want at this point i don't really have any fresh herbs today so i'm just doing straight butter which is absolutely fine even right now right flipped basted it's been about a minute maybe a minute and a half that's it at this point if you want i would really start taking the temperature on this thing like i said it's going to overcook so fast with this basting you got to be really careful it's about 78 degrees internal right now so we want to bring it up say 105 and then we'll pull it off and let it rest so that's it literally two minutes maybe two and a half minutes of basting and it's hit our target temp so we're gonna go ahead and remove this and i just put it on my spatula here to rest so there's some airflow underneath i'll rest this for three or four minutes it will continue climbing in temperature and then we will eat it all right my friend so here's what you do and i'm pretty sure i coined this term bacon of the sea that's why we scored it can you see what these are oh that's just a salmon skin sonny no it's bacon of the sea check it out take off a little strip like so ridiculous i'm convinced that anybody who thinks fish skin is gross if they try some proper crispy salmon skin like this for the first time there's just no turning back from that this is just as good if not better than bacon now let's get into the flesh here to see how that flakes away wow look at that wow i mean it's so flaky so light this is cooked about medium it's amazing how much food carries over when you're basting and i pulled this at 105 but i can just feel how incredibly tender this is light flaky and it just has that melt-in-your-mouth thing going on because of the fat in this schooner-based salmon i mean that goes down so easy really really delicious well my friends thank you for hanging out with me again today i hope you're ready to cook some salmon impress your friends girlfriend dog whatever i don't care parrot i had a parrot living with me growing up his name was bert it was a freaking psycho and you know the deal if you so wish drop a like leave a comment turn on notifications if you want to be a psycho and we love psychos here and until next time my sweet friends you know i love you when i'm out

Channel: ThatDudeCanCook

Views: 440,778

Keywords: how to cook salmon, salmon recipe, easy salmon recipe, dinner recipes, perfect pan seared salmon, pan seared salmon recipe, pan seared salmon, how to cook salmon in a pan, healthy salmon recipe, how to pan sear salmon, how to cook fish, cooking salmon, best way to cook salmon, how to cook salmon fillet, how to cook salmon with skin, salmon recipes for dinner, how to cook, easy salmon recipe pan, thatdudecancook, thatdudecancook salmon, how to cook fish in a pan, recipes

Id: e2_LozmPZKc

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022