If I could, I would eat almost all fish raw. Why ruin something when it is already close to perfection in its natural state? Cooking too often dries out the delicate flesh of seafood, especially fish. Salmon especially tastes really different cooked compared to raw. However, you can’t always guarantee that your salmon is fresh enough to eat raw. Therefore, sometimes you must cook it.
Well, if I must cook it, why not at least cook it minimally?
I’ve tried cooking salmon at low-temperatures once before, with my sous-vide technique that I tried several weeks ago. I love that method, but I also realize most people don’t have a vacuum sealer, a Magic Cooker, nor their own Sous-vide machine at home. In the comments of that post, a reader suggested to me an alternate way to slow-roast salmon in the oven.
This version is very similar, but takes a little less time and uses a bit more heat. It all comes down to this: the lower the temperature, the longer the cooking time, and the lower the risk of overcooking. To save time, you can increase the temperature and reduce the time, but you run the risk of overcooking. This combination seems to achieve a decent balance between the two.
Some recipes suggest cutting small slits in the salmon to render excess fat. In my case I’m not sure if it made a difference. Has anyone else ever tried this?
Slow Roasted Salmon
Ingredients
1 lb Salmon filet, cut into 4 equally sized pieces
olive oil
salt (preferably sea salt or kosher salt)
pepper (preferably freshly ground)
herbs (e.g., fresh dill!)
Preheat oven to 250 °F. Cut salmon into equally sized pieces and allow the pieces to warm up to room temperature. Season salmon by lightly coating the meat in olive oil, salt, pepper, and herbs. Bake for about 20 minutes.
The resulting fish will still be very soft and moist and will retain its gorgeous bright orange color. I used wild Alaskan sockeye salmon here, which is leaner but is quite flavorful. I think my favorite is still Alaskan King Salmon, though, which I most recently prepared via sous-vide in a magic cooker. I find Alaskan king salmon to be wonderfully fatty, rich, but definitely more expensive!
In any event, low heat cooking, similar to sous-vide cooking, will ensure that your fish will not overcook into a sad, dry version of what it once was.
Enjoy!
All Rights Reserved
I totally agree, I prefer my fish as raw as possible. Thank you for sharing this. Salmon is one of my favorites and I am typically disappointed in the way mine turns out. It’s either dry or looks dry. But this looks fabulous!
Oh I can use this for my parents’ anniversary dinner 😀 Thanks Jen XD
So glad you tried out my salmon suggestion! I love making low-temp salmon for dinner parties b/c I just season, cook it in the oven on its serving plate (which is why I bake it at 200F so the serving plate’s ok), serve drinks/apps to guests while it cooks, and then dinner is ready! Btw, great seeing you last night!
I’ve not had much luck with sockeye…I’ll definitely try this method! (or maybe it’s just the flavor of the fish that doesn’t sit well with me…)
google “salmon dishwasher”…i haven’t had the guts to try it but it does sound interesting if you tire of the magic cooker…
ooh, definitely going to have to give this a try!
Jaia, I agree with you and I still prefer King Salmon to Sockeye. I used the Costco frozen sockeye salmon in this case, and though it tasted soft and not overcooked, I still preferred the flavor of the King Salmon that I had made using the sous-vide method! Maybe it’s because sockeye has less fat?
Oh I love salmon – the taste, the colour, the texture… I agree raw is best, but I am delighted to have new insight into the best ways to cook it. Thanks!
Robyn
I agree with cooking salmon as little as possible! Dill is something I just never think of using even though it goes so well with most fish. I’ll have to change that 🙂
I HAVE to try this method, King salmon is definitely my favourite too. I like the taste of Sockeye but whenever I make it, the taste is good but the fish is dry. Can’t wait to try it, thank you for sharing.
I LOVE salmon- that looks delish! My absolute favorite salmon dish is linguine with smoked salmon. It’s definitely not healthy, but it tastes amazing!
Salmon, and most fish, only need to be cooked for a short amount of time, normally 10-20 minutes or you may place the salmon and seasonings into the vacuum pouch and seal it using your vacuum sealer before you cook.