Rebecca’s Recipe of the Week: Spiced Salmon with a Coriander Salsa | Canalside Community Food

Cooked slowly at a very low temperature, salmon becomes meltingly tender and immensely flavourful. It’s the complete opposite of the dry, overcooked fish one so often encounters. The fish is rubbed with a mixture of North-African spices and baked for nearly an hour. A coriander-packed herb salsa provides the perfect foil. Serve this with plain, boiled potatoes and a green salad for a spectacular meal.

The recipe is extremely easy—just make sure to allow an hour or two for the salmon to absorb the flavours of the spice rub before you cook it. This is a very good way of serving fish at a dinner party, since it doesn’t require any last-minute cooking.

Slow-roasted Spiced Salmon with Herb Salsa
Serves 6

Ingredients
For the salmon
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
2 tsp coriander seeds
2 tsp fennel seeds
3 cloves
½ tsp cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon turmeric
1 generous pinch salt
900g salmon fillet, skinned. Ask the fishmonger to pin-bone it.
Salt
1 tablespoon olive oil

For the salsa
2 medium shallots, finely diced
6 tablespoon lime juice
20g coriander leaves and tender stems, very finely chopped
2 tablespoon minced chile pepper. Remove the seeds if you don’t want this to be too hot
4 tablespoon spring onions, very finely chopped (green and white parts)
110ml neutral oil
Salt

Preparation
Toast the seeds and cloves in a dry frying pan over a medium-high heat and then grind finely with a pestle and mortar or a spice grinder. Transfer to a small bowl. Add the cayenne pepper, turmeric and salt.

Rub the spice mixture on both sides of the salmon, and refrigerate, covered, for one to two hours.

Heat the oven to 110C. Bring the salmon to room temperature while the oven is heating.

Drizzle the olive oil over the salmon and rub it in evenly with your hands. Roast in a baking dish for 40 to 50 minutes, until it begins to flake in the thickest part of the fillet when you poke it with a knife or your finger. Samin Nosrat notes that ‘because this method is so gentle on its proteins, the fish will appear translucent even when it’s cooked’.

While the fish is cooking make the salsa: In a small bowl, combine the shallot and lime juice and set aside for 15 minutes to macerate. In a separate small bowl, combine the coriander, jalapeño, spring onions, oil, and a generous pinch of salt. Add the shallots and lime juice, and more salt to taste.

Once the salmon is cooked, transfer it to a serving platter, spoon the herb salsa on top in generous amounts and serve.

Recipe adapted from Samin Nosrat, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (2017).