Cooking the Chronicle – May 2

Sometimes you see a recipe (“Poached salmon with dilled cucumber salad,” May 2) and know it’s going to be a slam dunk. Every single person in my family likes salmon, and as the weather gets warmer we have been eating more fresh salads and cold dishes.

This recipe gets filed under ‘dinner recipes that require virtually no prep, but come out pretty delicious.’ What I am saying is that this is a great weeknight meal to make if you have only 30 minutes, but want to put something yummy on the table. Prep took mere minutes, the salmon poached for 20 minutes, and while it was cooking I whipped up the quick cucumber salad with time to spare.

I have never poached salmon before, but I think this will be a new go-to technique. I was worried about not having a pot big enough to poach four pieces of fish, but layering them in my round dutch over, slightly overlapping, worked just fine. I peeked at the fish often to see how it cooked. To me, it went from lookin raw to cooked very quickly. Ours was almost overcooked, so watch the salmon closely so it doesn’t dry out.

I was intrigued if such a simple poaching solution would actually impart any flavor into the salmon. If you take the salmon out right after it poaches, I didn’t think there was too much flavor. But I left a piece in the poaching liquid for a few hours in the fridge, and when I tried it later that day you could really taste the bay and the lemon. This recipe would be really good served cold the next day, I think.

The dilled cucumbers reminded me a lot of the Daikon and radish cucumber salad that Jessica Grann published last October.  Easy, fresh, an herby bite. No brainer. This is where I opted to get my daughter involved, simple because the idea of explaining poaching for a three year old felt daunting. She is an excellent cucumber chopper.

My family really enjoyed this! What I liked most about the recipe is the fact that you probably play around with the flavoring of the poaching liquid to impart many different flavors into the salmon. I was thinking of trying a broth with Chinese five spice, miso or ginger, and serving the salmon over rice with the cucumber salad with a splash of sesame oil added. Yum!