Crispy Skin Salmon Recipe

Hi guys, Chef John here. Today we're going to make some salmon with our beautiful compound butter. Let's check it out. So I went to the fish market and I got some salmon. I got a side of salmon. So we need to do a little bit of cleanup on it. Looks like it's got some fat on there. One of the things that I like to do with my salmon is to shave it. Whenever you've got a nice piece of fish like this, I'll just take the edge of a knife and run it along and kind of clean up all the stuff that's been packed with the salmon. This will give you a cleaner tasting fish, especially since it's a nice oily fish. It was packed with other fillets on top of it in the seafood case and this will help to kind of clean that up, clean up some of that flavor. All right, now let's check out the skin side. Oh yeah, it's still got a lot of scales on there so we'll clean that up. You just want to follow the shape of the fish, the shape of the body. That'll help you really get into the skin and get under the scales and take them off. All right, so now that we've cleaned up the scales, taken the scales off of our fish, we can cut it into portion size pieces. All right, so we'll get a few nice fillets out of that and one of the things that you can do if you're really looking for that crispy skin is you can flip your fish over and kind of bunch it up and kind of score through it. What that'll do is it'll help the steam to rise up through the fish so it will cook at the same time while the skin is getting nice and crispy. Again, we'll bunch it up. You just make a couple of little slices per fillet. So now we're going to prepare our fish. We'll cover the skin of that fish, the flesh, and we'll do some pepper and some salt. Okay, now we're going to start with our pan. We're going to add, we're going to wait for that pan to get warm and then we're going to add some olive oil into it and this will just keep the skin from sticking. I know it's a non-stick pan, just a little bit, doing maybe a tablespoon. Now we're going to add that fish and skin side down and you're going to want to hold it down for about 10 seconds. One, two, three. Now the reason we're going to hold that down is so that the skin will actually begin to get crispy. If you don't hold it down, it's going to float on a on a pocket of steam and just to keep it from splattering everywhere, we're going to cover it a little bit. We'll do it offset. Some of that steam will escape. All right, it's been a couple of minutes. Let's take a peek and see what's going on underneath that filet. Oh yeah, it's got a beautiful crispy skin under there. We'll give that a flip and then we'll give it some of that beautiful lemon butter that we made. All right, can you zoom out a little bit? You can even zoom all the way out because I think I can. All right, so let's plate up our fish. We've got that beautiful crispy skin. We've got our butter in there. Now we're going to add some lemon into that butter. Just want to heat that through, warm it all the way up. All right, we'll stop the heat. The beauty of this is you can serve it however you want. If you want to serve it with the butter on the bottom, serve it with the butter on the bottom. If you want to serve it with the butter on top, serve it with the butter on top. It's your dish. All right, so let's give that salmon a taste. We'll get a little lemon on there. Oh yeah, that skin is still kind of crispy. Oh man, that is fantastic. I hope you try this dish and I hope your family loves it. Thanks for watching.