Salt-Roasted Salmon Is My Everest

"Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat." //F. Scott Fitzgerald//

To me, one of the most exciting things about cooking is screwing up. Not "I added salt instead of sugar because I was preoccupied with watching Hoarders" type screwing up, but when something by all accounts should taste damned yummy and decidedly does not. I love a good puzzle, and figuring out how to make the alchemy that is cooking work in my favor is exactly that.

I mention this because of a particularly puzzling recent kitchen fail. The dish was out of Tom Colicchio's first cookbook, Think Like A Chef, and like most very short recipes it was deceptively difficult to pull off. The promise: sear fillets of salmon skin-side down in pan; bury in coarse sea salt and put in oven; remove from oven, brush away salt, and voila! Perfect medium-rare salmon.

Never mind the logistics of coating a wet thing in salt and then removing it again. Salt-roasted! Doesn't that sound like a Nantucket clam bake in your mouth? Wouldn't it be the slickest party trick when I unearthed the salmon from its mound of salt table-side, expertly, effortlessly, Kitchen Goddess That I Am?

Alas, my first try at salt-roasted salmon turned out to be truly inedible. It came out something like cat food rolled in iodine, the most catastrophic result I had had since The Pumpkin Soup Incident Of '06 (a story for another day). This would have been embarrassing were my only guest not the long-suffering Viking, who looked sidelong at the salt-studded little brick of fish and gamely took the first bite.

Right. Crackers and cheese for dinner.

Truth be told I don't even like salmon all that much. Or Nantucket. Or clam bakes. But pride makes us do stupid things, and so I persevered with the recipe. A day may come when I am defeated by a small fish, but it would not be this day.

I won't bore you with tales of subsequent flops -- suffice it to say that I have instilled in the Viking what might be a permanent phobia of big red canisters of La Baleine sea salt ("Maybe it wasn't meant to be," he philosophized after my third attempt, as we stared wanly at our sad, pink little salt licks).

Okay, so the first time around I didn't exactly follow the timing as indicated, so being more diligent there solved the overcooking issue. Removing the salt continued to be a stumbling block. I tried different types of salmon and various ways of removing the salt (paper towel, pastry brush, bare fingers, tweezers, prayer...), but found that even a few granules of the pernicious stuff was enough to ruin the fish. Finally I gave up and put parchment paper between the salt and the fish, which turned out to be the winning (if inelegant) solution for some seriously tasty salmon.

On my final attempt I served the salt-roasted salmon alongside brown rice and a simple watercress and fennel salad with lemon-rosemary vinaigrette (pictured above). The entire meal took only an hour.

Six nights and one hour.


Salt-Roasted Salmon
Adapted from Tom Colicchio's Think Like A Chef

Serves 2

2 six ounce center cut salmon fillets (high-quality farmed or never-frozen wild)
3 cups course sea salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper


1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Heat olive oil in oven-proof skillet over medium-high heat for around 1 minute.

3. Add salmon fillets and cook for 2-3 minutes, until skin is crisp.

4. Remove skillet from heat and cover each salmon fillet in 1 layer of parchment paper.

4. Pour sea salt over fish, fully covering all fillets.

5. Move skillet to oven and roast for 6 minutes.

6. Remove salmon fillets from skillet with spatula one at a time, taking care to brush away any salt granules stuck to the bottom.

7. Drizzle with olive oil, season with pepper and salt, and serve immediately.