Season’s End Salmon Recipe Round-Up

As you have probably guessed, I cook a lot of salmon.

Most of fish Nic catches goes to the cannery to be sold across the country. However, he always brings a lot of fresh fish home too and we had about fifty salmon home-packed and frozen so we can eat them all year-long. For the price our salmon gets sold to the cannery for, it is actually about the cheapest thing we could be eating. While most people buy their wild salmon at the grocery store for over fifteen dollars a pound, a commercial fishing family loses usually less than a dollar per pound of salmon that they eat. Besides, we have the comfort of knowing exactly where our salmon came from and that it was wild and free its entire life.

In the interest of sharing the fishy wisdom I’ve gathered, here’s a quick round-up of my favorite new salmon recipes from the last couple of months:

Dinner Recipes

Roasted Salmon Brisket by Benny Doro

While the title of the recipe says ‘brisket,’ it means salmon bellies. Unfortunately, this is not a part of the fish most people are familiar with. Please, let me enlighten you: it’s salmon bacon. The fattiest, most delicious part of the fish. Yum. This recipe makes an excellent Paleo breakfast if you add some veggies.

However, I’m not entirely sure where you would get salmon bellies if you were only buying your salmon from the store and never meeting with a whole, fresh fish. I think I’ve heard that some butchers keep them, but you have to ask if you want them, because they aren’t pretty enough for the case and there are only about two bacon strips per fish.

 

Browned Butter Honey Garlic Salmon by Cafe Delites

This recipe is rich and wonderful. I’ve made it twice using some king salmon steaks from the freezer. For a dairy-free option, I’ve substituted Smart Balance instead of butter and it came out almost as good. We do miss the real butter a little, though. *sigh*

 

Grilled Lime Salmon with Avocado-Mango Salsa and Coconut Rice by Cooking Classy

This might actually be my current favorite of these salmon recipes. It was a wonderful way to change-up a basic meal. Of course, if you live somewhere where mangoes and avocados don’t cost an arm and a leg and are probably ripe, all the better for you. I used a purple Jasmine rice blend and it added some more lovely color to the plates. There was also enough of everything left over to have it for breakfast the next morning.

 

Simple Miso Soup with Salmon, Tofu, Mushrooms & Cabbage by the Seasoned Traveler

A delicious, dinner-worthy take on the miso soup you find in sushi restaurants. While some of the ingredients she uses are a little exotic, you can find them in most grocery stores. However, this is Kodiak and I didn’t have time to go hunting for specialty stores, so instead of making the traditional dashi (very tasty, but involving specific seaweed and specific fish flakes), I just added about a half a cup of moose bone broth to the water. It came out slightly heartier than usual, but the salmon was still enough to give it that ocean taste that usually comes from the seaweed in the broth.

Smoked

Classic Smoked Salmon by Hunter Angler Gardener Cook

This is a great recipe if you’ve never smoked salmon before. In fact, this is the recipe I started with when I was trying to learn to be a respectable fishwife. You do need a smoker and about eight-plus hours of attention for your salmon, though. I would argue that the result is completely worth it.

Smoked Salmon Nuggets by The Black Peppercorn

These are awesome party snacks. The cream cheese really makes a big difference for these, though. We found that they were a little salty if we were just eating them by themselves. That also could have been my fault, since I think I used the wrong kind of salt. It’s really cool to see how much moisture the brine mixture will suck out of the salmon. With this method, it’s almost caramelized before you even put it in the smoker.

 

Sorry, there’s none of my photography on this page. Firstly, I’m usually too eager to eat whatever I’ve cooked to bother photographing it. Secondly, I live in a log cabin and it’s Alaska in autumn, so often it’s been dark for a while by the time I make dinner. I’ll try to do better in the future.

 

For more salmon recipes, check out my Pinterest!

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