Searing any type of fish can be a tricky thing as it often sticks to your pan and can quickly dry out. Chef Booby Moore from the Barking Frog, located in Seattle’s wine country, will show you how to get the perfect sear on a piece of salmon with the skin on (stay tuned for the skinless version!).
Chef Moore starts by first heating the pan to the right temperature, then he shows us how to tell when our butter (or oil) is hot enough for the salmon (hint: watch for the shimmer!). Total cooking time for this piece of salmon is just 7-8 minutes for a nice medium-rare fillet. His must-have tool for cooking fish? A fish spatula.
Watch the short video below and say goodbye to dry, overcooked salmon! Subscribe to Foodista's Kitchen Secrets here for more culinary tips and tricks.
Try this delicious seared salmon recipe (shown at top) from Garum Factory: Seared Salmon with Strawberries, Rose Water and Balsamic Vinegar
Video Transcription
Hi, my name is Bobby Moore, executive chef at the Willows Lodge, home of The Barking Frog. I'm gonna show you how to sear a piece of salmon, put it in the oven and roast it to perfection. The first thing you want to do is you want to get your pan here nice and hot. We just added some clarified butter to the pan. When you just start to see that heat coming up off of the pan, that's when you know it's ready. If it's smoking like a forest fire, you know you heated it up too much. So you want to just season the meat side, and then we're gonna lay down the fish, skin side down first. Drop it away. So if any of the oil splashes, it's gonna splash that way and not at you. That's how a majority of people get burnt when they're searing fish at home. You've gotta go get a fish spat. This is a fish spatula right here that you guys can get at any cooking store. We're gonna pop this in to the oven, skin still down. Okay, now we're going back in the oven, the fish has been in there about two minutes. Turn that over with our fish spatula. We've got a nice crispy skin there. Turn it over, and now we're gonna pop it back into that 450 degree oven for another three minutes. That's gonna give us a real, nice beautiful mid-rare salmon, total of seven to eight minutes cooking time from the moment you started searing the fish.
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