Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

Pre-made salmon burgers are one of those things I refuse to buy. They’re really easy to make yourself in very little time, and they’ll be much better than anything you can buy in a store. The most important part of making salmon burgers is buying the highest quality salmon you can find. Once you’ve got your high-quality salmon, you want to keep it cold and work fast. Salmon is a fatty fish—and for this recipe, fattier is better; if you don’t mind buying farmed salmon, it’s excellent in this application for that reason. But that fat melts very quickly, making it difficult to form patties, let alone getting them to stick together.To help with forming the patties, and to give the patties a snappier texture, I combine chunked salmon with 0.5% of its total weight in kosher salt and add an egg yolk for every pound in a food processor and pulse it to create a coarse grind. The salt cures the proteins slightly, encouraging them to bond with one another and firming them up, and the egg yolk both adds a little extra richness and juiciness and interferes with the protein-bonding, which prevents the mixture from getting too snappy—we aren’t making salmon sausage.The mixture is still pretty loose when it comes out of the food processor, so I use a couple of tricks to help with patty formation. The first is I use a measuring cup to portion the salmon out. Filled up, the measure should yield consistent portions of about 235 g (1-cup measure) or 200 g (3/4-cup measure). A little nonstick spray in the measuring cup helps get the whole portion out cleanly onto a square of parchment, which has also been spritzed with nonstick spray, and set on a rimmed baking sheet.Instead of forming the patties in my hands, I spritz my (clean) hands with a little more nonstick spray and just form the patties on the square of parchment. Once I form all the patties, I transfer the baking sheet to the refrigerator to let the patties chill for anywhere from one hour to overnight. As the patties chill, the salt will do its work on the proteins, firming them up, and the salmon fat will also set up and become more firm.However, even when thoroughly chilled, these patties will stick if you throw them on a hot grill. So my final tip is to give the patties a little “presear” in a hot pan on the grill, just setting the exterior so that they’ll hold together once you transfer them to the grill for a little char and smoky flavor.Served in a bun with some instant-pickled lemon slices, these patties are everything the supermarket ones wish they could be: pure salmon flavor, snappy texture, juicy on the inside and lightly crisp on the outside.

Perfect Grilled Salmon Burgers With Instant-Pickled Lemons