Perfect Poached Salmon
Apr 26th 2007MargeFish & Food & Recipes
Marge’s way to make the perfect poached salmon - salmon is the absolute king of fish! Healthy, good for you, full of omega oil… but don’t let that put you off!
Ingredients:
- 1 whole salmon (minus head and fins)
- 1 small onion
- fresh herbs (can include: celery leaves, sorrel, giant chive and such like)
- 1 whole lemon
- seasoning
- water
- white wine
Method:
- Take the whole salmon and cut off the head and fins. I would strongly recommend getting the fishmonger to do this for you, and descale the fish and gut it too. If you can’t face doing these sorts of things then don’t! A good fishmonger is worth his/her weight in gold!
- Wash the fish to remove any last bits of gunge and set aside.
- Cut up the onion into slices, and wash the herbs if you are using any. Place half the herbs and half the onion on the base of an oval microwave dish (I use an old pirex casserole dish), and put the fish on top of the herby ‘bed’.
- Now a whole fish will still be on the bone (you can do this dish with thick fillets also, but remember to reduce the cooking time), so place a few slices of onion and bits of herb into the fish ‘cavity’. It won’t be a big space but this doesn’t matter. Add a slice of lemon into the gap too.
- Season the fish to taste, and put the rest of the onion and herb on top of the salmon. Squeeze over the rest of the lemon, and bung the fruit into the dish.
- Add enough liquid to fill a fifth of the dish - you don’t want the fish to be swimming (boom! boom!) in liquid. If you want, you can add some white wine as part of the cooking liquid too. The golden rule when using wine in any dish is that it must be good enough to drink. Never cook your food with ghastly tasting wine - this is a travesty!
- Put the lid on the dish and cook in the microwave for about 5 minutes on high, 4 minutes on medium and 3 minutes on low. You may need to change these times and temperatures depending upon your microwave and the thickness of the fish (mine is old and not so powerful).
- The fish is cooked when the flesh is no longer translucent (use a knife to carefully have a look, do not go just by looking at the cut where the head was!). Take care when cooking fish that you do not over cook it, in the words of Clarissa Dickson-Wright ‘over cooked fish is a sin against Heaven’. In fact in France I remember being served fish that was slightly underdone.
- Discard the cooking liquid an’all (I know some people would make a sauce with it, but I choose not to). Allow the fish to cool and serve with boiled new potatoes and peas.
