There's like, I don't know, it's very
um, what's the word I'm looking for, am-, anthromorph, anthropomorphic,
anthropomorphic? Where like an inanimate object takes on a- like it looks like a muppet.
Like you know what I mean? Like I feel like we, I feel like this is just missing a pair of googly
eyes and it's gonna like help us tell a story. Hello I'm Alison Roman, welcome to Home Movies.
Today we are making one of my favorite fish dishes of all time. It uses salmon, which is a fish
that I've only recently come around to loving, I'd say in like the past four to five years.
I don't know if it's because I grew up in California eating a lot of it or if it was the
way it was prepared, but I just never really got it. It was always kind of dry and flaky. It
felt really fishy to me. I just, it was intensely flavored and not in a good way and I just, it
wasn't, it didn't speak to me and it wasn't until I started cooking it very very low, very very
slow in a lot of olive oil, sort of like you would like a chicken confit or slow roasted
vegetables the flavor and texture of salmon can be. It's like better than any protein
in all of the land or sea. And of course, what would a salmon recipe be without dill?
Hello old friend. The other special thing about this salmon, in addition to the fact that it has a
great cooking technique that is pretty foolproof, is the fact that it basically tastes like a
bagel. Sometimes in like my creative process I will be doing something and think that it's
an original thought and then I'll be like, oh it's a bagel. Like I was like, oh yeah I want
like lemon and capers okay, and then like oh you'll be really like red onion, oh and then like
we should just like finish it with a ton of dill, oh I'm describing a bagel. That's what I'm doing.
I'm eating a bagel. Regardless of how many people I'm feeding, I really like to get a large piece
of fish because it cooks more evenly than small pieces and it makes for amazing leftovers. You
can do anything with a perfectly cooked piece of salmon. I think all right, this can be done
in a baking, this can be done in a baking dish or a baking sheet. I'll use a baking sheet. Why
not? And this is about two pounds of salmon and again if I'm feeding six to eight people, this is
an appropriate size fish or if I'm just cooking for myself, I will still cook a two pound piece of
salmon because I like the way that the leftovers very seamlessly mix into everything else that I'm
doing that week. I can use the salmon on salad, I can eat it by itself, I can eat it over grains.
This is not a show about what kind of salmon you should be buying because I always say, buy the
salmon that smells the freshest, that is the freshest, that is the most sustainable, that you
can find. Not all farmed salmon is bad and not all wild salmon is good. Ethically you have to
talk to the person selling you the fish to say, how is this fish caught? How is this fish raised?
Like what's the environmental footprint? Which also is a better chance to educate yourself and
hopefully that means that you're going to like, you know, maybe you're going to a fish
market you've never been to before and um talking to another human is awesome. This
is a piece of fish, um it has the skin on as you can see. We're not going to eat the
skin later so I'm not worried about oiling this but the skin of salmon has so much fat and
oil in it anyway, that it doesn't really stick and that's kind of the nice thing about it. But
I like the skin on the bottom because it kind of is like a protective layer between the fish
and the heat source. This is now the third, fourth time I'm slicing a lemon on the camera?
On the camera? On camera. The intention is to eat these lemon slices at the end of this so you
do want to make sure that they're thin enough to eat enjoyably. And then the onion, I also like
to slice in rings and you don't have to use a mandolin here I like it. When they're a little
bit thick, some of these onions we're gonna eat raw and some of these onions are getting frizzled
in the butter, so what I'll do knowing that now is the ones that I know that will be cooked,
I'll size a little bit thicker. We're gonna brown our butter and my butter is soft. Yours
does not have to be it's just it's hot in here. Um and this also calls for olive oil. The
butter won't brown if the olive oil is there so I'm gonna brown the butter first and then
I'm going to add the olive oil, the lemon, the onions, sizzle those all together. Add the
capers and then everything gets poured over our beautiful piece of fish. I am using
regular brined capers if you have salt packed capers that's cool too, you just
want to make sure that you are soaking them. The browning of the butter will take anywhere from
three to five minutes. But see how it's like foamy and the bits on the bottom are now brown.
And so to prevent this butter from turning to burned butter, I'm going to add some olive
oil, which is going to stop the cooking and prevent it from burning and also adding
that lemon and the onion. And then I'm going to add the lemon. It is going to splatter a little
bit because we're adding a liquid to a fat. But. And these onions I will try to keep intact
as much as possible. So I don't really want to disturb the skillet that much. I like
the way that they look in these rings. We're frying the onions really. We're not trying
to caramelize them or anything. I'm not going to touch this. I don't want to make the onions fall
apart. I'm not trying to disturb the lemon slices. I just want everything to kind of just like fry
in the fat really quickly and this is doing two things this is softening the lemon and the onions
and it's also infusing that butter in the fat with the flavor of lemon and onions. If you were a
real caper head, you could use the entire jar. I wouldn't mind that at all especially with a piece
of salmon this large. And you know what, I am a real caper fan, so I'm gonna use the whole jar. So
I've just drained them, I call for two tablespoons but honestly, this is probably like three and a
half. This is almost ready to get poured over, so I'm gonna season this with salt and pepper
just like you would any piece of protein. And right before the onions and the
lemons are where I want them to be, I'm going to add the capers to give them a
chance to kind of fry in that fat as well. Okay maybe that's a lot of capers. I'm
going to save these for a chef's treat. This is basically my bagel order. I like, I like it really well toasted, regular cream
cheese, never scallion, never any other type of cream cheese, red onion, capers, squeeze of
lemon, smoked salmon or gravlax, and lots of dill if that's available. But like dill is not a thing
you can order on a bagel necessarily, but it's if I were making a bagel at home, I would always
do that. One time I went on a date with somebody and like this was our first, after our first
date, we kind of got a little drunk and it was super fun, and the next day we were texting and
I was like, I'm really hungover, and they sent me a bagel from a bodega. They like had like it
delivered to my apartment. I was like damn, that is a sweet move. And then I opened up the bagel
and he had ordered sun-dried tomato goat cheese. And I was like, okay that's cool. Like I could
work with that that. But I was immediately like, that is not gonna work for me. What kind of
absolute sociopath orders somebody sun-dried tomato goat cheese as the default? Anyway,
I never heard from this person again, so it's fine but like indicative of the cream cheese
choice. Just, just guesses and be like plain cream cheese? I don't know their order. Like who's like
you know what, I'm just gonna go with the most basic thing, sun dried tomato goat cheese. Okay
this is ready. So you know this is ready because the onions are lightly fried. This is only
going into a 325 oven for about 12 to 15 minutes so nothing further will happen to these
ingredients. Everything that needs to happen to these ingredients needs to happen in this skillet.
This smells so crazy good to me. And when it comes out we're going to absolutely just demolish
the salmon with dill. At this point you can, you know, rearrange your onion slices and your
lemon slices to suit your aesthetic needs. If you're like, I'm really happy with the way
it looks straight out of the skillet, then that's great too. If you're insane like me and you
want to risk burning your fingers just so that the onion sizes don't overlap, go with god. This
is going to go into our oven, 12 to 15 minutes that's all. That's all it takes. It would take a
really long time at this temperature to feel like tough and rubbery and so if you're unsure about
your skills cooking fish, I feel like this will never ever steer you wrong. While that salmon
is in the oven cooking, I'm gonna just toss the remaining thinly sliced onion. I'm very into
the raw and the cooked onion flavors here. It's like if I get a burger, In-N-Out, I always get
caramelized onions and raw onions. In-N-Out order, uh I'm from California by the way so don't
come for me, telling me, oh Shake Shack, oh other burger places. No,
In-N-Out is the best burger. Uh, oh the fries aren't good. I didn't say the
fries were good. I said it's a good burger. Dan, why are you fighting? Dan, I could sense the
energy flying out of his brain. My In-N-Out order is a regular cheeseburger because the double
double is too much meat for me. I'm delicate. No special sauce, no ketchup, mustard, caramelized
onion, raw onion, that's the order. And lettuce. No tomato. No tomato, no ketchup, no sauce.
Everything else. Extra mustard and pickles. Can I say something? Yeah you can say whatever. That
is borderline the roasted red pepper goat cheese of In-N-Out orders. No it's not. I did and
he was like oh I don't know like I just did I didn't know what your order was. Maybe he did it
so I would do something like this one day and tell the story. Like something so absurdly memorable
that like I would think about him two years later, well guess what I never think about you, except
for now. So another lemon has entered our lives. What a blessing. I'm gonna only use half of it
if I had sesame seeds which I don't I would also be using them to top my bagel inspired salmon
dish but it's very good without sesame seeds too. Okay my salmon's done. I can tell because
I can smell it and because the timer went off. And we are gonna examine this salmon.
We're gonna examine the salmon. You can tell that before it's a lot more
bright pink, it's sort of translucent, and it's a lot richer of a color. And now
the color has changed. It's a lot paler, it looks more like uh Santa Fe salmon, as opposed
to like a Miami coral. Cue Pantone chips above or whatever. This is the thickest part of the salmon
here and this is the thinnest part. So if you have people that are eating with you and they prefer
their salmon on the more well done side, that's an option and you can you know near the tail
end and on the sides, the salmon is much thinner and therefore going to be a little bit more
well cooked. But it still should be very silky. Over here you're going to notice that it's
going to be closer to that former color that Miami coral and still be like a
little translucent a little juicier. It's so so silky and like tastes almost creamy. I
don't know it's, it's, it's just crazy good um and then to serve it. This is like pretty daunting
and honestly could look a little bit better because it's just like to me, just like what
like one big piece of fish. So what I like to do um is I like to take big hunks of it and kind
of plate it like that and that way it's also not intimidating for anybody looking to be like, how
do I serve myself from this large piece of fish? This to me is best eaten on its own really. Like I
don't feel the need to eat it with a side, but if you're the kind of person who needs like a starchy
element, I feel like boiled crushed potatoes would be really good with this, a pot of fluffy rice
would be awesome yeah. It's just like a very, very lovely preparation that will probably also remind
you of a bagel and like I said all these things are meant to be eaten so like this charred little
brown brown buttered onion lemon. This is so good. This would also work really nicely with cod or
halibut, if you're looking for something really expensive haddock would be good. What else can I
say about this dish that hasn't already been said. I'm eating! What do you want from me?
I'm walking here! New York bagels. This bit has really gone the distance.
