How to Make a Poached Salmon

Neal: Hello! My name is Neal and I’m from Mendon, Vermont. I’m wondering, when you’re cooking salmon, how do you make it eliminate any fishy taste or smell? Don Pintabona: Neal, so you’re asking about fishy salmon. I mean what we have here is a beautiful salmon. Obviously, we want to buy the freshest salmon we can buy and it really won’t be fishy. Sometimes the fishy smell comes in a more oily fish but here, we have a nice, pristine piece but you could also take care of that in the cooking method. What I would suggest is to poach it and the best way to poach it is in what we call court bullion which is a poaching liquid and you would start with just water. Generally, I like to add some celery, some onion we’ll add to it and you don’t even have to be too careful about peeling because you’re not actually going to eat the vegetables, you just want to grab the flavor from it. We got some bay leaf. You can add some carrot to this and the most important thing is to add a little bit of acid which helps cook the fish and sort of coagulate the proteins without getting too fancy but the lemon and white wine will accomplish that for you. So, we’ve got lemons in there, a little bit of dry white wine. We’re going to put this on the fire and we want it to simmer. We want to just see those steam and little bubbles coming up but this will help take away some of that fishiness that some people describe it as and it’s a really nice, healthy way to eat the salmon. That will poach nicely in about five to six minutes. I don’t like overcooked fish especially salmon. I’d like to have it a little more on the rare side, so myself, I would go more three or four minutes but it’s all up to personal taste. It’s my favorite way to eat salmon.