Simple Sockeye Salmon

My aunt Barbara used to make salmon all the time. She lived in a studio apartment in New York and her kitchen was smaller than my current bathroom, yet there was always something beautiful on the table. When she wasn’t stenciling powered sugar onto chocolate cakes she made these gorgeous savory recipes – many of them took about 20 minutes and could be made in her DeLonghi toaster oven. She loved that oven so much, when she saw one on sale she bought it and shipped it to me.

There’s no special trick – you simply put a little salt and pepper, a squeeze of lemon and some rounds, a light coat of olive oil and a few branches of your preferred fresh herbs on the salmon fillet, skin-side down, onto some aluminum foil and broil in the toaster oven for 17-24 minutes, depending on the thickness of the filets. It always looks pretty and tastes delicious, and it holds up for leftovers either as-is or in salmon salad.

Heating the whole oven for a few servings of fish is a huge waste of energy, so I have definitely inherited a love for toaster ovens. I remember my mother having me wrap beets and sweet potatoes in aluminum foil when she made a roast chicken so she’d use up the space in the big oven.

On a lazy evening like this, when there’s no energy for a big fuss in the kitchen this salmon is perfect. We had ours with some arugula from the garden.

Salmon Sustainability

Juggling seafood sustainability information is tricky business. Since seafood is a limited resource, eating conscientiously is complicated. There are no safe blanket statements, like “mackerel is low on the tertiary scale and so it’s sustainable,” or “fishing regulations have brought back the Pacific population of sea bass so it’s sustainable.” Although there’s some truth in both, neither are completely correct either. If mackerel fishing is unregulated many larger fish and ocean mammals won’t have anything to eat. If sea bass is relied upon as a sustainable alternative it’s populations will soon be back in trouble.

Salmon is just as complicated as most seafood. When I began looking into the various options for acquiring salmon, and researching whether there were any really sustainable choices, I made a few discoveries. Here are the general tips I have for smart salmon buying:

♥ buy the whole fish. Look for clear eyes, not foggy or sunken ones. Most whole fish is either fresh (depending on where you’re located) or was flash frozen at sea, which allows the fish to retain far more freshness than when fillets sit for days in the fridge at the market.

♥ look for wild salmon that’s been troll caught, drift gillnet caught, or line-caught. Many seafood markets don’t label well, but I’ve noticed good signage at many of San Francisco’s Chinese fish markets, and also at Whole Foods. Steer clear of farmed salmon – the only farmed salmon that I can really get behind is off the north coast of Scotland, but then you have a pretty big carbon footprint… Most US Atlantic farmed salmon is not up to par, and some US farms are playing around with genetically modified fish! Gross! Wild Alaskan salmon is what to look for…

♥ buy Sockeye salmon, or chum, if you can find it. They are less sought-after by chain restaurants and so they suffer less over-fishing. They have even denser nutrition than Coho, and more interesting flavor. I use Arctic Char and Golden Trout as other salmon alternatives. Artic Char is very similar to salmon; it is tasty and can be found in higher populations and also more inland than salmon. Char take half as long to mature as salmon, so they are easier on other resources as well. Golden Trout is a fresh water river fish that is found in the Sierras and beyond. It is genuinely a trout, but its flesh has the ripe peachy hue of salmon and the taste is incredible. If you’re lucky you could catch one of these on a pack trip.

♥ skip foreign fish, with seafood, local is always better. Second best is well-regulated, and as much as we hear Washington bickering about regulation, the US has better fishing laws than many other seafood-exporting countries.

♥ skip farmed salmon. Oh, did I say that already?

I met this cookbook author at a San Francisco food event last year and she had wonderful insights, I recommend checking her out.