Salt-Grilled Fish: Salmon Shioyaki Recipe
We're feeling the light, flavorful, quinessentially West Coast recipes from the Sunset Essential Western Cookbook. Next up, a recipe to satisfy your sushi craving without all the guesswork involved in...you know, making sushi. Enter, salmon shioyaki, your new go-to Japanese dish.
Add shioyaki — Japanese for "salt-grilled"— to your repertoire. The technique creates salmon with an umami-rich crust and a crispy skin. Taichi Kitamura, chef of Kappo Tamura restaurant in Seattle, shared the recipe — it's been his favorite way to eat fish since his childhood in Kyoto, Japan.
Start with our foolproof recipe for sushi rice.
Salt-Grilled Fish: Salmon Shioyaki Recipe
Prep Time
2
hours
Cook Time
15
minutes
Servings
4
Total time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Ingredients
- 4 sockeye salmon fillets
- 1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt
- 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
- Hot cooked sushi rice
- 4 sheets nori (about 8 square inches)
- lemon wedges
- Furikake* (Japanese rice seasoning)
Directions
- Set salmon on a cooling rack in a rimmed pan, sprinkle fillets all over with sea salt, and chill uncovered at least 2 hours and as long as 5 hours.
- Heat a grill to medium-high. Fold a 12-by 20-inch sheet of heavy-duty foil in half crosswise.
- With a knife tip, poke dime-size holes through foil about 2 inches apart. Oil one side of foil. Rub fish all over with oil.
- Set foil with oiled side up on cooking grate. Set fillets slightly separated, skin side down, on foil. Grill, covered, until fish is barely cooked through, 7 to 12 minutes. With a wide spatula, slide fish from skin to a platter and tent with foil.
- Cook skin on foil until crisp, 2 to 3 minutes more. Remove foil from grill, then gently peel off skin, using fingers or a wide spatula (skin may break into pieces).
- Serve salmon immediately with crispy skin, rice, nori, lemon, and furikake.