Salmon 104 F Class

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

Digital scale

Fish pliers

Joule® Turbo Sous Vide

Sous vide bag(s)

Chamber vacuum sealer

Water

Salt

Sugar

Salmon loin

Olive oil

Ice water

Scale ingredients

Dissolve the salt and sugar in the water.

Chill brine to less than [c 5].

CHEF’S TIP: Dissolve the sugar and salt in half the weight of water, then add the rest of the weight in the form of ice to quickly chill the brine.

Make brine

While brine is chilling, remove pin bones from salmon loin.

Prepare salmon

Submerge salmon loin in chilled brine for 45 minutes.

Brine salmon

Strain salmon portions from the brine. Pat dry with a paper towel.

Remove salmon from brine

Vacuum-package the salmon loins individually. Add a small amount of olive oil to the packaging along with the fish to make it easier to slip the cooked salmon out later.

HOME-COOK HACK: If you don’t have a vacuum sealer, you can used an improvised method like <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/simple-sous-vide-packaging">water displacement</a>.

Vacuum-package salmon or seal in a plastic bag using another method

Heat sous vide water bath to [c 40]. Lower bag into sous vide bath until salmon is fully submerged.

Cook for 1 hour.

NOTE: If you don’t have access to sous vide equipment, don’t worry: <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/improvised-sous-vide-pot-on-a-stove-method">watch this simple introduction</a> to cooking sous vide with an inexpensive digital thermometer.

Heat sous vide bath and cook salmon

Remove the packaged salmon from the water bath and submerge in an ice bath.

Refrigerate for at least 6 hours to allow texture to set.

Chill immediately; refrigerate

Gently remove chilled salmon loin from packaging and portion into ten [g 40] portions, each about [cm 2] thick.

Cover and refrigerate sliced portions until needed.

Slice and reserve

A rough translation of the French phrase mi-cuit is “half-cooked,” but that utterly fails to express the decadent texture of this salmon. A combination of heat and salt work in concert to ensure that although served chilled, this salmon is anything but raw.As a wave of concentrated dissolved salt (enough to raise the salinity above 2%) permeates the flesh, various proteins in muscle fibers begin to unravel and entangle. This is curing, and it’s analogous to increasing the temperature of flesh with heat. Salt or heat alone can take meats and seafood from raw to cured or raw to cooked (either will denature proteins and cause them to gel), but when they’re used together, you can get the same effect with less salt and a lower temperature. The result is a remarkable texture. One subtlety of this recipe, which often goes unnoticed, is the need to chill the salmon for at least 6 hours before serving. The chloride ions from the salt are still diffusing toward equilibrium after the sous vide–cooking step, and this chilling step allows the texture to fully develop.Finally, cooking in vacuum-sealed packaging has the benefit of keeping the salmon impeccably fresh by preventing damaging oxidation. If you don’t have access to a vacuum chamber sealer, don’t fret: we’ve got <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/simple-sous-vide-packaging">a hack</a> that will help you achieve similar results without all the equipment.Provided that you store the salmon at a temperature below [c 5], the combination of low-temperature cooking, mild curing with salt, and oxygen-free packaging will keep your fish fresh for 10 days or more. This makes it a delicious and versatile ingredient to keep around for a quick, healthy dish such as our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/salmon-104-f">Salmon 104 °F</a>.

Salmon Mi-Cuit