A Farewell to Fishiness — Just Brine and Bake

I grew up fishing trout. We’d catch them, clean them, and eat them right there, blistered in a skillet on the fire. First thing in the morning, then again for dinner. Skin-on fillets, heads, eyeballs, no problem.

Then I graduated to salmon. Then, deep-sea fishing. Going after tuna, I landed a blue shark. Very bland, like swordfish (yes, I went there). Then I got into crabbing, picking oysters, digging geoducks. You know, the normal Northwest coastal childhood.

About a year ago, I was fly-fishing on the Purdy Spit. Beautiful day, sunny, warm. Cutthroats were coming in. That eagle couple that hangs out on the new power tower kept an eye on me and some other fisherpersons.

A guy across the channel and his buddy landed a nice, big salmon. The power couple eagles noticed and launched to hover over him.

He picked up a rock and bashed the salmon in the head, then looked at his buddy with a big gawking grin on his face, and bashed the salmon some more.

The eagles flew away.

So did I.

Purdy is mostly catch and release except for hatchery fish, depending on the time of year, so maybe he got lucky.

I didn’t think much about it. But not long after, I was at some formal fundraiser thing, all dressed up, glad-handing people while asking for checks, then sat down to dinner where I was served a wonderful piece of fish, some white thing, not even salmon.

Couldn’t touch it.

Then it got worse.

Couldn’t eat any kind of fish. Couldn’t eat crab. Crab! I have a boat, truck, and trailer just for crabbing.

And then all the ethical, economic, and environmental reasons not to eat fish or meat started crowding in on my very private brain space.

I stopped buying meat. And eggs. And I love meat! And eggs! And I hate vegetables! What was happening to me?

Apropos of something, an old friend decided to help. “You need total immersion therapy,” she said, which I assumed meant some spa with hot tubs and cool guys.

But no.

It was some high-end sushi joint in Seattle. She insisted we sit at the sushi bar so we could look at the stuff we were supposed to eat. I avoided eye contact with the dead fish parts, the sushi chef, and her while getting by on some tofu faux-fu thing and lots of those mini carafes of sake, whatever they’re called.

Turned out she had a lot to talk about. Something about leaving her second husband, I think, who I never liked, along with the first one. The place was trying to close, and she was still talking, but they courteously gave us more sake, like that was going to make us leave.

Then somebody delivered a massive salmon to the sushi chef to prep for the next day.

While my friend babbled on about her soon-to-be third husband, the chef gently laid a hand on the salmon and slid a knife through it from head to tail in one motion. He separated the fillets, skin down, put a hand on the meat, and slid the knife through each again. He sliced the skin into matchstick slivers and used chopsticks to place them in a container. He sliced the meat into whatever they call standard sushi size, and when he got to the cheeks, I piped up and asked for one.

The chef gingerly prepared a piece wrapped in a bit of nori, dabbed with a touch of sea urchin roe, and silently served it to me without fuss or charge.

It must have been something about the ceremony of his processing the animal that reawakened whatever had been shut away inside me.

I thought I’d better try fish again, but I wanted to do something different. I scoured a bunch of recipes, all of them too familiar, until I came across a bit of news I’d never heard of, or at least noticed: wet brining.

It made a difference, at least to me, perhaps because of the small amount of ceremony involved and whatever the chemical reaction is that tenderizes the fish without destroying it. Anyway, it’s not going to hurt your dinner and might help your soul. (It’s supposed to be good with shark, too, and makes everything less fishy somehow.)

Wet Brining and Baking

If you don’t like that awful white stuff coming out of your salmon, brining and low-temperature baking will help. It’s a protein called albumin that coagulates with heat and is both unattractive and mostly avoidable.

Dissolve 5 tablespoons kosher salt in 3 cups water, for starters. Adjust as needed. Use half the amount for table salt and even less for sea salt.

Cover the salmon or whatever with the saltwater in a flat dish and refrigerate for 30 minutes. If you feel up to it, take the skin off first since it will be too soggy to use later on.

Remove the fish and let it drip-dry for another half hour.

Place fish flat in a baking dish, glass preferred, and add a generous slug of neutral oil. Some people will pile in all kinds of attractive aromatics at this point, but I like to taste the fish and, if you’re going to this kind of trouble, you do too.

I will allow a few sweet onions, chopped into big slices so they don’t disintegrate, and maybe some removable sprigs of rosemary, but that’s it.

Bake at 250 for 30 minutes or so. If the fillet is large, a couple of pounds or more, this should translate to medium rare, or opaque in the middle. Of course, a working probe thermometer will help (I’ve got a drawer full of them I’ve burned out), and it should read no higher than 125 when you pull the fish out to let the carryover heat finish cooking it.