The Michelin-Star Way to Make Salmon at Home

I'm Adrienne Cheatham, I'm a professional chef,

and today I'm gonna show you

how to make restaurant-quality salmon at home.

We're gonna go over some techniques

to take your salmon game to the next level.

Save yourself from dry, boring fish.

This is Restaurant Brioche-Crusted Salmon 101.

There are some really easy ways

to get restaurant-quality fish dishes at home

that don't require a ton of work.

My favorite is making this brioche-crusted filet of salmon.

One of the biggest challenges with cooking salmon at home

is overcooking it.

This recipe helps buffer the heat

and makes it a little bit more forgiving.

You don't have to worry as much

because the bread will give you a lot of flavor contrast.

It'll give you some of that buttery richness

to make up if the fish is a little bit dry.

This is something that we used to do in restaurants

when we were cooking for large parties.

It's crunchy, it's delicious,

and that is the beauty of this particular technique.

Your fish should always be cold

until you're ready to cook it.

You never wanna let your fish fluctuate in temperature

because that can contribute to it breaking down

and spoiling a lot faster.

This is straight out of the refrigerator.

I like to season my fish a couple of hours

before I'm gonna work on it.

The seasoning will start to seep into the fish itself.

It'll also pull out some of the excess liquid

and help the flesh kind of tighten up a little bit.

It's just one of those pro tips

that help make things just a little bit better

than you would normally do.

I'm gonna go ahead and pop this salmon in the fridge

until I'm ready to start cooking dinner.

I like to use brioche

because it's crisp and light when you cook it up,

but it also has a little bit of sweetness.

You can literally change this out for any bread.

I've done this with sourdough, pumpernickel,

whole wheat bread, sliced white sandwich bread.

The best thing about using a whole loaf that's not sliced

is that you can determine

how thick the breading crust is going to be.

This recipe is also a great way to use up some bread

that's getting stale or not so fresh.

So now that I have my two beautiful slices of brioche cut,

I'm gonna place my salmon directly on top

with what would be the skin side facing down.

It's the flatter side of the two,

so I don't have to worry about the bread not making contact

with the uneven top of the salmon.

You don't need to put anything on there

to hold the fish to the bread.

When you start to cook it, it will release that white stuff

that you see coming out of salmon.

That's called albumin. It's similar to like an egg white.

It's just a protein,

and it will make it stick to the bread itself

without having to add anything else.

Now I'm just lining my knife up with the edge of the salmon

and I'm trimming the bread right there.

Again, cutting right alongside the bread.

The fish is seasoned, it's ready to go.

If you're gonna cook it right away,

you can let it sit out for up to 20 minutes

to come to room temperature.

But if you wanna wait for an hour or so before you cook it,

just go ahead and pop it in the fridge.

It is time to start cooking our fish.

This is a really cool process that I absolutely love

because it is very forgiving.

We're gonna start in the saute pan,

but we're gonna finish in the oven,

so the fish itself will get a very gentle

kind of cook around it.

I'm gonna start on low heat.

I'm using a little bit of neutral oil,

and let that slowly heat up.

Add the butter now and just let that kind of melt.

The butter is more for flavor.

The oil is really gonna help us facilitate even browning,

and it'll also help raise the smoke temperature

and help us minimize the risk of burning.

I'm using a stainless steel pan,

but you could use any oven-safe pan.

The butter is bubbling now,

and you can see it starting to turn

a little bit of a darker golden color.

I don't wanna go too high, too fast

because I don't wanna burn the brioche.

I wanna give it a chance to absorb the fat

and slowly start to get golden brown, delicious, and crispy.

I'm carefully placing my salmon

with the bread side down into the pan.

The butter is bubbly.

Give it a little shake.

Gradually increase the heat

from like medium low to barely medium,

and make sure you're shaking your pan occasionally

to make sure that it's not sticking.

Shaking it in the pan also helps distribute the heat evenly,

and you don't get a dark spot here and a light spot here.

It's looking GBD.

Butter is delicious,

but I love a little bit of aromatic flavor.

So I'm gonna add a couple sprigs of thyme to the fat

and one clove of crushed garlic

just to add a little bit more aromatic flavor to this dish

while it's cooking.

You can see that the bread has kind of pressed down

and condensed under the weight of the salmon.

Flip it now so that we don't cook it

all the way on the bread side,

and then we're gonna pop it in the oven.

And don't worry if you get a couple of light spots,

you can always flip it back over and brown it

right before you take it out of the pan.

If I wanted to do this ahead of time

before I have guests coming over,

instead of flipping it and putting this pan in the oven,

I would take them out of the pan and put them on a tray.

That way when my guests come over,

I can put this whole tray in the oven

for five to seven minutes.

Say you have 50 guests,

just brown the bread, put your fish on a tray,

pop it in the refrigerator,

and then right before the party starts,

get it back in the oven

so your fish is freshly cooked for your guests.

I have my oven preheated to 350.

That will help cook everything,

but we're not gonna go so hot

that we risk burning the bread.

Cooking time depends on the thickness of your fish.

These are very thick,

so I'm gonna check them at four to five minutes,

but I have a feeling they might take closer to seven.

The fish has been in the oven for about five minutes.

Let's check it. It looks like it actually might be done.

So there's a couple of ways

to look at your fish to see if it's done.

You see this white protein, if that's starting to come out,

your fish might be cooked all the way

and the protein is starting to leach out.

It doesn't mean our fish is overcooked,

but we wanna take a look inside.

So I'm gonna use the corner of the spatula

just to barely open up one of the flakes.

We can see right in the center that it is opaque.

You don't see any of that deep pink translucent look,

but it's not overcooked, and that's a great thing.

Another way to check if you have a cake tester at home

is to insert it straight into the center of the salmon,

give it a couple seconds and touch it to your bottom lip

or just under your bottom lip.

If it feels really, really hot,

you know your fish is overcooked.

If it feels warm, you're perfect.

So when you're inserting your cake tester,

sometimes you can feel the cake tester

breaking through each piece of sinew,

which is the membrane that holds the muscle groups together.

That's a really good indicator that your fish is very rare.

I do not need to put this back in the oven

because it is already about mid well.

There's also residual heat in the pan

that will help carryover cook.

So our salmon is cooked.

It's time to get it out of the pan and onto the plate.

I'm just gonna serve it

with a little simple salad on the side.

I mean, to me, this is very simple in terms of technique,

but so delicious, very high impact,

and it has that wow factor.

And this is how I make restaurant-quality salmon at home.

Ooh, look at that crust.

Hmm.

The fish is tender, it's flaky.

It's not overcooked and dry.

The bread gives you the crust on the top,

some light fluffiness in the center.

And because it's absorbed that flavor from the butter

and the thyme and the garlic,

it's not just plain, boring salmon.

The bread, it'll give you some of that buttery richness

to make up if the fish is a little bit dry,

and that is the beauty of this particular technique.

Cooking salmon at home

does not have to be redundant, dry, and boring.

With just a couple of cool, simple techniques,

you can really up your game

and give yourselves and your guests

an incredible wow factor.