Chum Salmon with Roasted Hakurei Turnips and Gai Lan

As an East Coaster, I'm always surprised at the dearth of fish species that we have in our markets out here in the Pacific Northwest. Granted, a lot of what we harvest goes to Asia, but still, compared to what I am used to, we have very little variety out here.

Very little variety except for one fish family: the Salmonidae, the salmons. We have the very famous species that everyone knows: King/Chinook, Coho, and Sockeye. Also famous, but rare, is my favorite, the ocean-going rainbow trout that we call Steelhead Trout. Finally, we also have Pink Salmon, which in general ends up canned, and Chum, our most numerous salmon, but which is not held in very high regard, being associated with the salmon that the sled dogs eat.

Because of the stigma, Chum Salmon doesn't command the price of King, Coho, or Sockeye. But when caught out in the ocean in its silver phase, it's a delicious fish, milder and less fatty than the other salmon species, and a great buy for people looking for wild-caught salmon at an affordable price.

I scored a pretty piece of chum and some fresh hakurei and gai lan at the farmers market recently and decided to plate them all together for a delicious fall dinner.

Chum Salmon with Roasted Hakurei Turnips and Gai Lan

Everything on this plate is done simply. The salmon is seared in a black steel pan. The gai lan is blanched and then finished in garlic olive oil. The turnips are roasted at high heat until their cut surfaces brown. Everything in this dish is of pristine quality, so I didn't need to do anything cheffy to help it out, no sauces, no tricks, no pizazz. One of the great secrets of fine cooking is to start with the best ingredients. I used to tell my line cooks, "My job is to source the finest ingredients and yours is not to fuck them up."

Blooming Gai Lan and Hakurei Turnips

Gai lan is also called Chinese broccoli and is in the same family as our familiar broccoli. This bunch of perfect gai lan is in bloom. A bit of bloom like this is just fine. What you don't want is any kind of broccoli in full flower. Broccoli flowers, like all Brassica flowers, are edible and make fine garnishes for dishes and salads. I especially like radish and arugula flowers for garnishes.

Roasted Hakurei Turnips

Hakurei turnips are mainly sweet with just a tiny hint of radish bite. Although you can use them like any turnip, I prefer them for raw applications and roasted like this, in which case, they become very mild and melt in your mouth.

Browning Slivered Garlic in Olive Oil

When doing garlic oil as a garnish for vegetables, I like to sliver the garlic and serve bits of the browned garlic as an additional garnish. You can see in the very first photo that I have put some of the garlic on top of the gai lan. After blanching the gai lan, I reheat it in the garlic oil just before plating. In this way, you can blanch the broccoli hours before service, if you shock it in an ice bath to stop it cooking and from turning olive drab. I cooked my broccoli an hour before dinner so that I could concentrate on cooking the fish to perfection.

Seared Chum Salmon

I cook salmon skin-side down until the skin becomes very crisp and delicious. The skin is always the best part. Chum salmon, because it is very low fat when compared to red or silver salmon, wants strict attention in the pan. It is not a fish that can really tolerate extra cooking, so take it off the heat a little sooner than you might other salmon. In the lead photo in this post, you can see that mine went on the plate still showing a bit of pink in the center of the portion. By the time we got to the table to eat, it was perfect. Fish timing is not something I can teach in a blog post; it's just something you figure out by doing it over and over. You can't teach experience, alas.