The 3 Salmon Techniques Every Chef Should Learn

Salmon, a beautiful and versatile fish, just as good at home as it is in the best restaurants in the world. I'm taking this incredible fish through three levels of cooking. Beginner, intermediate and advanced. A technique I learned in a two Michelin star kitchen. Firstly, here's a method to cook perfect fish at home every time. So I'm just going to season the fish all over. The way I like to do it personally is sear all three sides of the flesh very lightly and then put it on the skin, finish it on the skin, turn the pan off and let it rest on the skin so it goes really crispy. So I'm just going to start it flesh side down and just leave it on a medium heat. With our salmon we're just going to do a really nice little garnish of some cherry tomatoes, new potatoes and a few little green beans. So just nice and simple. Then I'm just going to touch the sides of the salmon. Just about 20-30 seconds on each side there just to sear it. This is very similar to the method which a lot of chefs use which is the 90-10 method. Where you cook the skin 90% of the way on the skin side and just flesh the other side. That's effectively what we're doing here but we're not using the exact percentage. But the process is very, very similar. So just a little bit of colour on each side. Really simple. I've got some nice pre-boiled potatoes. Just going to cut those in half. A little bit of colour on that other side. And onto the skin. And then just going to turn the heat down slightly and just leave the salmon in the pan now. After about 2 minutes I'm going to turn the pan off and just leave the salmon to rest. Exactly the same as meat you should always rest your fish. It won't have the same sort of bleeding out juices but it will definitely release water and lose moisture if you just cook it and serve it straight away. We're just going to leave that to rest in the pan now. Turn the pan off. And I'm going to put my cherry tomatoes in the same pan. A little bit of salt. A little bit of pepper and just leave those to lightly blister in the residual oil in the pan. So while my salmon is resting in the pan, I'm just going to take that off. I'm going to pop another pan on the stove. Good quality oil. A few green beans. Ours have already been blanched. But you could just boil them in boiling water and then place them straight into the pan like so. Medium heat just to warm through. Really good amount of pepper. Green vegetables love pepper. A little sprinkling of salt. And I'm just going to warm those through really gently. Once they're warm just take the pan off the heat and then we're going to finish the potatoes. So the salmon was, we seared all the sides, then we put it onto the skin, giving it two to three minutes, turn the pan off and then just letting it rest in the pan, skin side down. Tomatoes we put in the same pan as well just to blister and just slightly warm through. As you can see the salmon skin is now lovely and crispy. And it's just going to continue to sort of dehydrate and caramelise while it's in the pan. To finish our potatoes we've got a little bit of parsley and just a little bit of dill as well. Dill goes really well with the fish. We're going to drop our potatoes in there. In a knob of butter. Again a little bit of salt. A little bit of pepper. And then we're just going to roll all of our herbs up. Chiffonade the herbs. So just cut through them nice and fine. Doesn't need to be crazy fine. Just turn that heat down nicely just to warm through. I've got my herbs chopped there. I'm just going to do a little bit of garlic as well. Finely sliced. Just going to drop that about one medium clove of garlic. So my potatoes are nice and warm now. Butter's just nicely just starting to very lightly brown. And a little bit of lemon zest straight onto the potatoes like so. We've got our warm green beans there. Just going to give them a little shake nicely so they all sort of line up. Place our potatoes. Just give it a little final bit of salt just on the skin. Place our salmon onto our dish. A wedge of lemon. And then if you want you've got that sort of buttery, garlicky, herby mix. Which you can just use as a dressing. So here we have level one salmon. Worth mentioning about the salmon. Obviously one of the most eaten fish around the world. It's renowned at the moment for not being that sustainable because there's a lot of people doing it very badly. This is Westeros salmon. Line caught, small production. Probably like the most sustainable salmon you can get. Obviously the majority of people that are doing it badly is why salmon's getting a bad rep. But there is still some people doing it really well. And hopefully this continues to change in the industry so we get more beautiful suppliers like this. Level two. Cooking fish on papayot. So cooking fish basically in paper. In a paper bag. Just going to make a nice little parcel. Just going to fold my paper in half and then fold that half in on itself until you have a nice even paper. Like so. And then fold them back on each other so you can get a nice little canoe shape when we're finished. Now on each end I'm just going to tie it together. Like so. Tie a nice little double knot. And then just going to do the same on the other side. Now we're making a little almost like dish. Then we just open it out. We've got a nice little base. I'm just going to unfold the sides. Ready for our fish to sit in. Like lo, lovely, lovely, jubbly. There we have it. So we're going to make a little trivet in the base of our bag to place our fish on. So you can do this. You can obviously make this much bigger and place the whole fish in there. I'm going to do some really nice slices of leek. I'm just going to place those across the bottom. And the salmon will sit nice on top of that. Three or four cloves of garlic. Just lightly crush it with a knife. Just to extract the flavour. You can load this up with whatever you fancy. Going to add a couple of slices of lemon. Just going to lay those in. And a couple of slices of ginger as well. We're going for that sort of like nice Thai infused flavours with the lemon for the nice freshness. The fish is going to sit on top of that. And it's going to steam with the white wine. All the flavours will be steamed up into the flesh of the fish. So I'm going to shave the fennel and use that as a garnish. So I'll just slice those again nice and fine. Place those into our base as well. And then we're going to place our salmon in. Flesh side up. Tiny bit of oil. Tiny bit of vinegar. Little glug of white wine. Unravel the paper. Bring the seals together. And then basically just fold them over to create a lovely seal. Just pinch it and roll it all the way over. Trying to make sure you've got nowhere for any of the steam to escape. Okay, so now we've got our salmon in our bag. We're now going to place this in an oven set to 180. And this is going to take about 15 to 20 minutes. Salmon goes in. Say goodnight. And we'll see that in 15 minutes. Okay, I'm taking my fish out of the oven. You can kind of lightly squeeze it through the paper to feel the cuisson. I think that's about right. So for our sauce, I'm going to place a pan on the heat. So this is our Thai yellow curry broth. So just going to warm that through lightly. So in here we've got coconut milk, we've got some onions and shallots sweated off, garlic, lemongrass, ginger, and like a nice Thai yellow curry paste. So we're just going to have that on a low heat. Going to do a little, a very light, shaved fennel salad. So just got a little bit of fennel, lightly sliced. Just going to dress that nicely for our garnish. So now we're going to open up our fish. So you just lightly peel off your aromats. Place the fish to one side. And then we're going to take our leeks out and just lightly place them on the bottom of our bowl. A little bit of seasoning. And we're going to use the juice from the bag just to acidulate our sauce. So to dress our fennel, we're just going to, a little bit of rapeseed oil, a little bit of pepper. If this fish is cooked, the skin will easily peel off. And then for extra presentation, you take a knife, scrape out this grey blood lime. Just adds a little bit more finesse. Scrape it off like so. So to finish the salmon, just a little bit of oil over the top, a little bit of salt, just over the flesh where the skin has been, and a touch of lemon. Pour our sauce into our dish. A few little bits of sea purslane. And lastly, just a little bit of kaffir lime oil. That is level two salmon. This is level three salmon. A technique that Will and I learnt at dinner when we worked together. Two mission star restaurant. It is a, it's a confit salmon. What we're going to do is we're going to skin the salmon, remove the blood lime, and we're going to cure the salmon in a salt, sugar and citrus zest solution before we confit it very lightly and then sear it. We're going to remove the skin at about three millimetres above skin line so that we remove as much of the blood line as possible. Hold your knife nice and flat. So what you're trying to do is like so, is leave the blood line on the base of the fish so you have this really perfect side piece of salmon. So what I've done since then is remove that little bit of blood line from there. There's nothing wrong with the blood line. This is all just about, you know, fine dining, Michelin techniques, just making it, getting it to be perfect. We're also going to move that slightly thin bit of salmon on the belly just to make sure we get a nice even cook. So to make our cure, we're going to start off with a 60% salt and 40% sugar. So three parts salt, two parts sugar. Also going to grind in some large pepper. A little hack for you, instead of grinding up peppercorns with a pestle and mortar, just open up the grind on your pepper mill. Pretty much the same. Next up, lemon zest and lime zest. The zest is kind of optional. Obviously the salt and the sugar is what you want to firm up the flesh and to help season it. Whereas the zest is just purely for flavour. But it will work fine without it. Then we're just going to mix our cure together like so. Then once I've got my cure, I'm just going to lay it all over the salmon. Underneath, all over. Pack it nicely and make sure you've got the sides. Cure that for one and a half hours before we wash off the cure. So here's my salmon. It's now been curing. Now I'm going to wash off all this cure in cold running water. So into a pan, I'm going to add my olive oil. I'm going to place the oil into the oven. I've got my oven set to 100 degrees, the lowest setting it will go. I'm going to give my oil five minutes just to temper up to the right temperature. After that, we're going to drop our salmon into the oil. So after five minutes, I'm just going to remove the oil, just so the oil should just be coming up to that temperature that the oven's set to. I'm going to lower our salmon and then back into the oven for 10 minutes. So after 10 minutes, we're going to pull out our salmon. It should now be like just warm, but because the salmon's cured, we don't need to serve it piping hot. We've got some pickled cucumber here, which has been pickling for 12 hours. So the next stage we're going to do is we're going to get a pan really nice and hot and we're going to roast our salmon on one side. I'm going to go in with my salmon on the skin side. I'm just going to very lightly push it down 45 seconds to a minute. Just a light bit of pressure. So we want just a really nice sear on one side. I'm just going to roast this cucumber again on one side and we want to char this really hard. The cucumber can take a lot of charring and that slight bitterness on the roasting of the cucumber is going to help with the flavour of the dish. Pickled in a basic pickle. That's just sugar, water, vinegar and salt. Touch of lemon. Okay, so our cucumber's now ready. Going to turn the heat off. Just flip it onto the other side just to warm through slightly. Then we're just going to season the cucumber. Seaweed crumb. Just going to dress it all over the cucumber. This is salmon and seaweed. Just adding a different level of texture. And I've got some lovely pickled lemons here for garnish. Beurre blanc here, which you've made just in the traditional French way. We can show you how to make the beurre blanc in one of our other videos. To our beurre blanc, we're just going to add a little bit of pickled seaweed. To plate up, we're going to add our roasted cucumber to our dish. Some sorrel. A little bit of bronze fennel. Followed by our lovely salmon. And then finally our seaweed beurre blanc. Pickled lemons. And we've got a little bit of herb oil just to finish. Inner, intermediate and advanced. So number one. I mean, it's delicious. Even if you overcook it slightly, it's still pretty good. En papillon. It's delicious. I mean, it is equally lovely. It almost feels more delicate. Almost lighter. Slightly lighter. Although it's the same fish. And there wasn't that much fat on this one. This one feels lighter. It feels a little bit healthier. It feels a bit more elegant. You can taste a little bit of lemon and ginger and garlic just permeating through the flesh. And then number three. The confit. Instead of having like a nice salty outside, you have a really, almost like a more rounded flavour on it. The texture of the fish is softer. It like melts in your mouth. By doing it this way, for a little bit higher temperature and shorter, you do get a slight texture on the outside. Which means you kind of, you don't feel like you're eating slight mush. And that little bit of roast on the top gives it a little bit of caramelisation. Another texture. And it's my personal favourite way. And I think lots of different skills on Showcase with the confit, the curing and then the roasting as well. I literally just ate three pieces of salmon.