How One of NYC’s Best Chefs Cooks Perfect Salmon in 10 Minutes

Salmon is a fish a lot of people get wrong,

but it's so simple and easy to cook at home.

Just a few key things you got to do.

One, get a really crispy skin.

Two, don't overcook it.

Three, make a really delicious sauce that pairs with it.

You do not need to be intimidated by cooking fish at home.

My name's Ed Szymanski, and today we're gonna make

my perfect version of pan roasted salmon.

All right, we have a beautiful site

of salmon in front of us.

So from this, we're gonna cut a couple of portions

so we can make dinner for two.

As you see, there are two main parts of the fish.

This side, the belly side,

which is a little bit thinner, a little bit fattier.

We have the loin side on this side,

which is thicker and will take longer to cook.

It's a little bit leaner.

Couple of tips that are very important that you follow

if you're making salmon at home.

Number one, when it's in your fridge, leave it skin side up.

What that will do, is allow air to circulate over the skin

and dry it out quicker.

If it was skin side down,

moisture would fall off into the skin.

And moisture is the enemy of a crispy skin.

The next thing is to inspect our product

and make sure it's good and smells and looks delicious.

We want it to smell clean like the sea.

We do not want it smell fishy. That's a bad sign.

Then you call your fishmonger and say, What the hell, man?

This smells delicious.

It smells like a wharf. Like being right by the sea.

Another thing to check for is the color

and appearance of the salmon.

We want it to be quite bright and shiny.

We don't want it to look gray, or dull, or matte in color,

both for the skin side but also for the flesh side.

Lastly, we want it to have a nice firmness to it.

We don't want spongy soft salmon.

That's a pretty bad sign that it's old

and started to decay on the inside.

See this, if I push it, it pushes back.

That's a great sign. This is a nice specimen.

We're gonna check briefly for scales.

You can do that just by running your fingers

against the salmon upwards.

The scales run from the head down to the tail.

There are no scales coming off.

This is a nicely scaled piece of fish.

It's ready now to be portioned and then we can cook it.

Now we have two options when portioning it.

One is to portion it across.

That's the way you see it at home

when you get both the belly and the loin.

The other way is to portion it as the belly is one piece

and the loin is another piece.

When we're at the restaurants

and you see those perfect cubes of fish,

that's the way we do it there.

I like to do it for the home cook, cross the salmon.

This is the best way to make sure you get even portions

for everyone at the dinner table.

Make one nice cut and go all the way back,

and you can apply a little pressure,

and your salmon will separate nicely.

Use the sharpest knife you have,

use the biggest knife you have.

You do not want to chainsaw through your salmon.

Now if you get the portion size wrong,

it's not the end of the world

unless the Michelin inspector is there looking for you.

And you can see really nicely here the fatty belly here

and then the leaner loin.

From now on, we're gonna keep them

only facing the skin side up so we can keep it really dry.

And before we start cooking it,

I'm actually gonna blot it with a paper towel.

Moisture really is the enemy of a crispy skin,

so the drier we can get this, the better it'll crisp up.

If you throw it in a pan without blotting it dry,

the danger here, is that moisture from the skin

gets into the fat that you're cooking it in the pan with,

and gives you this soggy sort of flaccid skin

that's not very tasty at all.

Blot blot blot. Nice dry salmon.

Now, we are ready to prepare our vegetables.

We're gonna prepare the rest of our mise en place.

Mise en place means having all our preparation ready to go.

We do not want to be cooking salmon

and then over here, cutting shallots,

and then back over there basting salmon.

Prepare everything, move it to the stove, cook everything,

and then sit down with a nice bottle of wine and eat dinner.

So we'll start by chopping up our shallots and our garlic.

You call these shallots in America,

and I've been caught saying that on camera on accident,

so now I'm very careful to say it the English way.

[Crew] What's the right way to say it?

Shallots.

Kind of sauce I'm making today

is a lemon caper brown butter sauce,

quintessentially French, very delicious, very simple.

Shouldn't be afraid of making

brown butter sauces at home at all.

Now separate from that on the side,

we're gonna cook some beautiful spinach

with some Dijon mustard and some garlic and some shallots.

Give it a nice vibrant, hearty green

that pairs really nicely with that fatty salmon.

Shallots are sweeter than onions,

and the sweetness of the shallots, I think,

is a lovely compliment to the irony flavor of the spinach.

It'll all go really nicely,

and there's great flavor compliment to the salmon.

So these we're gonna cook in a little bit of butter

before we add the spinach.

Now we'll do a little bit of garlic too.

Two cloves of garlic, I think, is plenty

for two pieces of salmon.

You have to use fresh whole garlic.

Like the peeled garlic, it should be in prison.

You shouldn't be allowed to buy

pre-peeled garlic, I don't think.

All right, now to prep our spinach,

so we're gonna take it off the stem.

We do that by pinching and pulling.

Spinach and salmon are very friendly companions.

You'll see when we cook it down in the pan,

this will shrink to almost nothing.

This is maybe not even enough for two people to share.

And this spinach will come over to the stove with us.

Now we're gonna chop our parsley.

We'll roll it up a little bit.

Parsley adds this beautiful herby brightness to it.

You almost won't find a recipe at one of my restaurants

without some sort of freshly chopped herb.

Really, it's like the classic companion to the brown butter.

A little bit of stem never hurt anyone.

There's the Snoop Dogg rules in restaurants,

where there's no stems and no seeds in your herbs

when you're picking them.

And you see the parsley is relatively roughly chopped.

There's a really nice quote from a famous British chef

who says, You should chop it just enough to tame it.

And now we have our ingredients ready and prepared,

let's go to the stove.

[upbeat music]

When it comes to cooking salmon,

the number one thing with all cooking in general,

do not be afraid of your pans.

Do not be afraid of the heat.

Do not be afraid of your ingredients.

If you cook timidly, your dishes will taste timid

and a bit weak and not very interesting.

But cook bravely,

and you'll be rewarded with delicious food.

We're gonna cook this in a cast iron.

This is a great heavy bottom pot for cooking things

that you wanna get a really nice crust on.

Now you do not need to use a cast iron.

You can use a non-stick.

You can use a stainless steel pan.

First step, get our pan nice and hot.

You do not want to start your salmon in a cold pan.

Then we're gonna season the salmon from a height.

And we do that so that the salt can spread evenly.

If this looks like a lot of salt, it isn't.

Same thing on the other side.

Season both sides of the fish.

You see, by doing it from a height,

we get a nice even coating.

Now how do you know when your pan is hot?

You use your senses. You put your hand near it.

If you can do this for a long time,

your pan is not very hot yet.

One thing we don't wanna do is crowd our pan of salmon.

It cools the pan down so quickly

that you can't get a nice sear on it.

This is starting to get nice and hot.

Now we're gonna add olive oil.

We use an unflavored oil or a lightly flavored oil.

We don't want it to smoke too much when it goes in the pan.

But we do need it to get hot

and not take on an accurate flavor.

We use a nice amount.

We want to cover the base of the pan in the oil.

You see it's starting to shimmer.

That's a good sign that the oil is hot.

Now we're gonna turn the heat down a little bit,

and it's time to add our salmon.

[salmon sizzles]

Overall, start to finish, this is less than 10 minutes.

Now if it does not make that noise

when you put it in the pan,

your pan is not hot enough.

Straight away in the pan,

I can move this fish around, right?

It is not sticking.

That is because we got the pan hot,

and it's 'cause we got the skin dry.

Now here's a nice little technique.

We want the skin to be evenly brown.

So to do so, we're going to apply pressure

from our fingers onto the salmon,

so that it's an even contact with the pan.

This is a like restaurant level tip now.

You will feel a little bubble

starts to hit against your finger

from the inside of the salmon,

or the air pockets bubbling up to touch your fingers.

Now they make weights you can use

to hold on top of your salmon.

If you're really averse to touching your food,

your fingers work just fine.

Sort of pick it up and start to see it.

We're starting to get a little bit of color on our salmon.

This is a good sign.

We have a ways to go here.

You don't really want to rush this process.

The salmon is starting to look cooked up from the bottom,

not quite on top.

This side is still very much raw in the middle here.

So we're gonna start now by basting the thickest side.

We're gonna bring the pan towards me

and use some of the oil that pools at the bottom

to cook the top side of the salmon

without ever having this salmon come into contact

with the bottom of the pan.

This is a gentler way to add heat to the salmon

whilst allowing the whole time we're cooking the fish,

the skin is in contact with the pan.

It means that the skin is never not getting crispy,

the whole time.

This is getting nice and crispy.

You see at the top now,

this color change is the process of cooking the salmon.

So by not flipping it, by just using a spoon and hot oil,

we're getting nicely cooked salmon on the top,

and we're ensuring that it's cooking nice and evenly.

I think the ideal doneness for salmon

is when it has a nice, crispy skin,

and has a little bit of pink left in the middle.

Now you can choose to do that

by the amount of time you baste it.

You baste it for longer, you cook it more on top.

If you like your salmon rare, you could stop now.

The outside is set.

The inside is gonna still be pretty rare at this stage.

I'm gonna cook it all the way through for you.

Both methods are good.

It depends what you want in your fish.

Now here be careful, 'cause this top is hot.

We're gonna pick up our salmon and look at our skin.

And you see how nicely, evenly gold and brown that is?

Nice and crusty.

Now here's an interesting step.

Before I add the butter,

I'm gonna remove some of the oil from the pan.

I want to remove the oil

so that the sauce tastes more like butter and less like oil.

I don't want it to be too fatty.

The salmon is evenly cooked,

and very importantly, it's all crispy.

It's not like some parts are crispy

and the others are splotchy.

It's lovely to have the salmon

resting here for a little bit.

One thing people don't do at home is rest their fish.

You all know to rest your steaks and other proteins.

It's the same with fish too.

You cook it first, and then you let it rest

to allow it to reabsorb some of the moisture

that's lost in the cooking process,

and to let the muscle structure soften a little bit

so that it's more tender when you eat it.

So I'm gonna let the salmon rest

and we're gonna start the sauce.

[upbeat music]

We're gonna make a brown butter, lemon, and caper sauce.

This is gonna happen quite quickly.

Do not be afraid of your butter.

We're using unsalted butter

from the best cow's butter you can find.

The butter is the sauce.

So that's where the flavor comes in.

And brown butter is made just by cooking butter in a pan

until it starts to caramelize some of the milk solids

and they start to go nut brown.

They call it beurre noisette in French

'cause it smells like hazelnuts, which I'm allergic to,

but not to brown butter.

You see all of this beautiful foaming butter?

Really smells so great.

It's such a natural pairing with fish.

You can make a different sauce

without caramelizing the butter.

It's called a beurre blanc, means a white butter sauce.

I love brown butter with salmon though.

Now, in a black bottom pan,

it's harder to tell when your butter is perfectly nut brown

because the bottom is dark.

If you wanna do this slightly easier,

you can do it in a separate pan

that has a stainless steel bottom to it.

To do this, we kinda have to hold it up in our spoon to see.

And when we start to have a little bit

of the color we're looking for,

we're going to add our capers.

And now what they'll do, is stop the cooking process

'cause there's moisture in them.

You hear that fizzle up. [capers sizzling]

Capers are these delicious little salty nuggets

and they bring this brininess

and this saltiness to the butter.

So because we were cooking a fat and we added a liquid,

that stops the fat from caramelizing anymore.

Now we're gonna add a nice, big squeeze of lemon juice,

lots of acidity.

We're gonna add a tiny splash of white wine.

[wine pops]

The lemon and the wine come together

to create this really flavorful sauce.

So the lemon and the white wine arrest the cooking process

the same way the capers do.

By adding liquid into a caramelizing fat,

you cool the temperature of the fat down instantly

and that stops it from continuing to brown.

I'm gonna move this sauce to a different pan.

We'll save our lemony, capery sauce over here.

We'll come back to that later.

And now we're gonna cook our spinach.

So to do that, we'll add a nice dollop of fresh butter.

And as that butter is melting,

we're going to cook our shallots and our garlic in with us.

And when they go in the pan,

we'll add a little bit of salt straight away.

And you wanna add the salt to pull out some of the moisture

in the shallots and the garlic,

and to start the cooking process.

We are not looking for sort of deeply caramelized,

we're just looking to remove some of the raw flavor.

We're keeping all the flavors together.

So we started this in one pan,

we're gonna finish it in one pan.

And we get a little bit of cook

on these shallots and this garlic

and starts to smell aromatic.

This is like the magic trick for restaurants,

when you walk in and it smells like onions and garlic

or shallots and garlic,

people say, Oh, it's so good. What's cooking?

It's just shallots and garlic.

We're going to add our spinach in.

The irony flavor of spinach works really nicely

with the fatty richness of the salmon.

This looks like a lot of spinach, but it really isn't.

It's gonna cook down really quickly.

We're gonna add a tiny bit of salt.

We're just gonna let moisture do its natural thing here.

You could put a lid on this and it'll happen quicker.

But just by letting the spinach

come into contact with the pan,

it starts to wilt so quickly.

You don't want to over wilt your spinach too much.

You just want to cook it down

and let it absorb all these flavors.

And you don't want raw spinach,

at least not for this preparation.

We're now gonna add a glug of white wine to this.

Any dry white wine will do.

You don't wanna use anything too sweet.

Now, spinach is coming down, starting to look delicious.

I'm gonna add a nice big dollop

of Dijon mustard to this too.

Mustard, and salmon, and spinach

are all really friendly flavors together.

We'll sort of stir that in.

We'll finish it with a little bit of lemon juice,

a little bit of cracked pepper.

The lemon adds a really nice brightness and acidity to this.

Pepper is just a tiny bit of spiciness,

balances out against some of the richness

of the flavors of the salmon and the brown butter sauce.

Spinach is done when it stops shrinking in size.

It's not gonna get any smaller than this,

and it's now fully cooked all the way through.

We'll turn our heat off.

We'll set that to the side, our brown butter sauce.

Now, the one thing we didn't add to this, was our parsley.

The reason we don't add that earlier

is because it will go brown.

A nice bright green herb should stay green.

So we like to add that at the end.

And we'll do it when the sauce is not too hot,

but it should still be warm.

So now we'll just bring this together.

Now we're ready to go to the plate.

[lively music]

Really simple dish,

and we just have to sort of slop it on the plate

in an elegant manner.

Take our spinach and leave a nice little pool.

We'll take our crispy skin salmon with our fish fat.

Just lay it elegantly next to the spinach.

And then take our caper and brown butter sauce.

And we spend all this time making sure

the skin is nice and crispy,

so we don't wanna sauce on top of the skin.

You know, this is crispy still.

So we'll go our sauce all around the dish.

You put some on top of our spinach, some all around.

I'm sort of swirling it together

so I get all of the flavors of both the salmon,

and the parsley, and the capers, and the lemon,

and then that luscious brown butter.

And you should, I think, have a nice crusty baguette

next to the dinner table when you're eating this.

You can soak up all of those juices.

And that is our crispy skin salmon

with spinach, brown butter, and capers.

This beautiful salmon,

it's nice and evenly cooked on the inside,

nice and pink still.

I'd take a piece of the belly off,

mix it with the caper sauce.

Hmm, really high quality fish, crispy skin.

There's nut buttery sauce.

There are no nuts in it, by the way.

Sort of really unctuous rich flavor.

And then the mustardy spinach

cuts through the richness of the salmon.

Really beautiful.

Try a little bit from this side too.

This is a perfect weeknight dinner for two in 20 minutes.

And this comes together so quickly, and it's so simple,

and it shouldn't be intimidating.

And salmon is such a versatile fish.

It can be used in this preparation

and in hundreds of others.

It's a really delicious, nutritious way to eat.

[upbeat music]