How to Make: Broiled Furikake Salmon with Tofu Watercress Salad

Aloha, it's Chef Keone here. Today I'm going to show you how to make a super easy and ono broiled furikake salmon with tofu watercress salad. First, let's make the marinade for our salmon. In a bowl, mix shoyu, mirin, sesame oil, and honey. Go ahead and stir this up. I'm using four salmon fillets with the skin off and I'll place the salmon into the bowl and let it marinate for about 20 to 30 minutes. Once the salmon is marinated, remove the salmon fillets from the marinade and place them on a greased baking sheet. I don't want them to be touching. You want the skin side down. You can see this is the skin side. You want it to be down. Then, sprinkle furikake generously over the top of each fillet. And one of the things that is really fun too is I'm using the sort of like original, right? But we also have two other fun flavors that you can use and you can kind of mix and match. We have a yuzu one here, which is kind of cool. It's got you know that citrus flavor. And then we have this is ume. So if you like ume, like that tart, that shiso thing that's going on, this is a fun one to put on here too. Mix and match. Have fun with them. Now, the other thing is you don't want to marinate and you don't have the furikake. It's totally cool to do like a little bit of lime, salt, pepper. I do that a lot too. It's a clean, cleaner flavor. It's just really about the fish. And if you really want something fast, that's the way to go. So now we've got the salmon ready. I'm going to go ahead and put in a preheated broiler for about 8 to 10 minutes. Now, before we assemble the tofu watercress salad, I do want to mention you can find all these ingredients to make this dish at your neighborhood foodland. And you can get this and more local easy recipes at foodland.com. Now that the salmon is boiling, let's make the tofu watercress salad. For the dressing, whisk together shoyu, rice vinegar, lime juice, sesame oil, and vegetable oil, grated ginger, and a drizzle of honey or maple syrup. As you can see, I was sort of eyeballing this recipe. And you can follow the recipe that I have written. But also when I'm making these, I go by feel and go by touch. And so you should be very comfortable doing this on your own and doing your own going to taste. Now that this is all together, let's finish the salad. So we're starting with local Sumida Farms watercress. I'm going to add in some colorful Whole Farms tomatoes, also local. Then we've got keiki cucumbers that's going to go local. This is our makai tofu that's going to go in. And then we have avocado. This is a Haas, but when local is in season, delicious. And then we'll go ahead our dressing. Now the dressing you can see here, it's sort of separated again. So I'm going to just stir it up to bring it all together. We'll go ahead and pour it all over the salad, let it all come together. Now what's important when you mix this is you don't want to take your tong or your mixing utensil and just really go hard at it. You want to go and you want to work around the bowl and fold it over so that you're being gentle and you're not really, really hitting it too hard. And what you're looking for when you're making this salad is that the dressing is coating it evenly. The leaves of the watercress are shiny, but they're not completely soaked and wilting. Your goal is to make it look like it just happened to fall exactly everything in the right spot. Garnish the salad with toasted sesame seeds and season it with salt and pepper. All right. So here we have our broiled salmon and it looks really great. You see how it's nice and golden on the top to check the doneness, right? A couple of things you can do is feel it. It should be sort of nice and springy. It shouldn't be hard and as hard as overcooked, but if it's really soft and relaxed, it needs to go a little longer. The other thing that you can do if you really want to be precise about it is use a thermometer. Go into the thickest part of the flesh and you're looking for 120 to 125 degrees. That's just about medium temperature for salmon. It'll be really juicy, delicious. The other one, if you don't have a thermometer, take a fork, just carefully poke it into the flesh here and then when it goes in and if it doesn't resist, if it yields and nicely slides in, then you know you're good. You can also touch it to the bottom of your lip and it feels nice and warm. Then you know you're good to go. So there you have it, broiled furikake salmon with tofu watercress salad. These go great by themselves, rice as a side, but as a pairing, really, really delicious and healthy too. Enjoy!