Grilled Salmon with Spinach Sauce

Name: Grilled Salmon with Spinach Sauce: Easy Grill Pan Recipe
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 30 min
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Salmon fillet (salmon, trout) 300 g; Whole coriander seeds 1 tsp; Salt 0.5 tsp (3 g); Mustard seeds 0.5 tsp; Whole black peppercorns 4-5; Vegetable oil for greasing the skillet; Fresh spinach 200 g; Butter 50 g; Water for boiling the spinach 1.5-2 l; Salt 0.5 tsp for the water and to taste in the sauce (3 g); Black pepper to taste

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30 mins

Perhaps the simplest way to cook fresh fish, even without a kitchen, dishes or home comforts, is to fry it. Remember fried pollock back in the day. People usually just say grilled fish, without specifying what kind of grill.

A grill is a device or tool for cooking food. Usually it means a grate or skewer set over hot coals, or a grate with electric heating, or, more convenient in a city kitchen, a skillet with a ridged bottom: a grill pan.

Grilled fish is easy to make. All you need is good fish. A delicacy, what is usually called red fish. It is a common misconception that red fish must have red flesh.

Strictly speaking, that is not true. The common name red fish is used for delicacy fish, more often from the sturgeon family. Though in everyday use salmonids also fall into this category: Atlantic salmon, trout, pink salmon. Some salmonids with white flesh (whitefish, nelma), however, are called white fish in Siberia. Apparently red here means best.

To give the grilled fish a good aroma, our main spice is coriander seeds, toasted first in a dry skillet and coarsely ground in a mortar. Coriander is a remarkable spice that goes wonderfully with fish and meat, especially pork. For home cooking we haven’t used store-bought ground coriander for a long time, only whole seeds, which are ground right before cooking.

Salmon hardly needs a special side dish. If anything, a side dish is superfluous. The taste of the fish is already wonderful on its own. So it is enough to pick a sauce with a neutral flavor, or cook the fish in batter. The sauce adds less a new flavor than juiciness. For this purpose a sauce of green spinach braised in butter works very well. Fresh spinach is usually used for salads, but a green spinach sauce turns out excellent too.

Grilled fish, with a simple and clear recipe, comes out very tender, and the green spinach sauce makes it very juicy and brings out the flavor.

More with red fish

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Salmon Risotto

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Salmon Pasta in Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

1 serving

For the fish
Salmon fillet (salmon, trout) 300 g
Whole coriander seeds 1 tsp
Salt 0.5 tsp (3 g)
Mustard seeds 0.5 tsp
Whole black peppercorns 4-5
Vegetable oil for greasing the skillet
For the sauce
Fresh spinach 200 g
Butter 50 g
Water for boiling the spinach 1.5-2 l
Salt 0.5 tsp for the water and to taste in the sauce (3 g)
Black pepper to taste

Step-by-step recipe

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How to prepare the fish and spices

When choosing fish for grilling, you must make sure it is fresh. Stale fish will spoil the dish, and most often stale fish is simply dangerous. After frying, grilled fish should stay in one whole piece rather than fall apart. You can choose steaks, pieces cut across the body near the ribs. But in my view the most convenient is to fry the tail part: skin-on fillet without bones or backbone, which gives the tastiest grilled fish.
Be sure to scale the fish. Stores often don’t scale fish before cutting it, or don’t do it thoroughly. Grilled fish must be free of bones and scales, otherwise eating it is unpleasant. That is the rule.
Prepare the spice mix. Toast the coriander seeds in a dry, very hot skillet, stirring constantly. Toasting takes from 1 min. Usually 1.5–2 mins is enough, and the coriander takes on a wonderful smell, apparently as the essential oils are released.
In a mortar, finely grind 0.5 tsp each of salt (3 g), mustard seeds and toasted coriander (set another 0.5 tsp of coriander aside for now), plus 4–5 black peppercorns. Once the spices are ground fine enough, add the remaining coriander to the mortar and crush it just a little, so the fine mix contains coarsely ground coriander seeds.
Pat the washed fish fillet dry with a paper towel; you don’t want extra moisture, or the grilled fish will simply steam instead of fry. Coat the fish with the spice mix. The right amount of spices will stick to the fish and the rest will just fall off. Press the spices lightly into the fillet with your palm. Leave the fillet with the spices while the skillet heats up and the green spinach sauce cooks.

How to make the spinach sauce

Prepare the spinach. Wash the green spinach leaves and sort them, discarding damaged leaves and trimming off the stems.
In a large pot, bring 1.5–2 l of water to a boil and add 0.5 tsp of salt (3 g). Boil the spinach leaves for 3–4 mins at a gentle boil. Then drain the leaves in a colander and cool them under cold running water. Squeeze the spinach lightly by hand to remove excess water. Cut the spinach with a knife, not too fine. You should get narrow noodle-like ribbons.
Melt a piece of butter in a skillet. Add the boiled spinach to the hot butter, salt and pepper to taste, but not too much, and braise covered over low heat for up to 10 mins.

How to grill the fish

While the green spinach sauce is braising, prepare the grill, in our case a grill pan. Lightly grease the pan with vegetable oil so the grilled fish doesn’t stick or burn.
Place the fish skin side down on the very hot grill pan. Fry for 5 mins.
Then turn the fish over and fry for another 5 mins. This is usually enough, since the fillet is thin, but if you are unsure, you can add a little. By the way, if you rotate the fish 90 degrees on the grill pan while frying, you get a nice crosshatch pattern from the ridges of the pan.
Many people argue about whether to keep the skin after frying; by and large the skin is mostly there to keep the fish from falling apart. It is up to you: once frying is done, the crisp skin separates from the fillet easily, and the grilled fish becomes simply a tasty fillet.

Serving

Spread the green spinach sauce over a large plate. Put the grilled fish fillet on top of the sauce.
Serve the grilled fish only hot, with a glass of good table wine.

Calories and macros

1050 kcal

Serving ≈ 390 g

Protein68 g26% of kcal
Fat83 g72% of kcal
Carbs4 g1% of kcal

100 g267 kcalProtein 17.4 gFat 21.1 gCarbs 0.9 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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