Category Archives: Salmon

Save Bristol Bay

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Now is the time to stand up for salmon, grizzly bears, the 10,000-year-old cultures of Native Alaskans, and one of North America’s signature ecosystems.

Please, if you enjoy this blog and what it means to savor our wild places, take a moment to add your name to the many who are trying to save Bristol Bay and stop Pebble Mine.

The proposed mine would be in the headwaters of the greatest salmon-producing watershed in the world, a place of unparalleled natural value and unbroken ecological processes. The rivers that empty into Bristol Bay, Alaska, nurture more salmon than anywhere else on Earth. All five species of Pacific salmon spawn in the system, as well as trout and char. Bears, moose, caribou, and a host of other large mammals thrive here. It’s a landscape of stunning beauty.

Ten billion tons of toxic mine tailings are not compatible with this ecosystem.

Tailings dams bigger than Grand Coulee Dam in the Bristol Bay headwaters, an active seismic zone, are not compatible with this ecosystem.

The EPA recently released its draft assessment, suggesting that environmental degradation, should the mine proceed, is likely, even imminent. The EPA has the authority under 404(c) of the Clean Water Act to put a stop to this nonsense. Pebble Mine supporters are on the ropes. It’s time to knock them out for good. Tell the EPA and your elected officials NO PEBBLE MINE. Time is running out for public input. This is the final week to let your voice be heard.

For more information:

In late May I attended the first public hearing on the issue, held in Seattle. The room was packed, and then the overflow room was packed. In all, I counted more than 400 people in attendance, and according to this summary, more than 80 percent of the speakers supported the EPA and its draft assessment. (More than 90% in the Bristol Bay regional hearings were in support.)

The comment period (2 minutes per person) included testimonies from Native American subsistence fishermen, commercial fishermen from Washington State and Alaska, local businesses and tour operators, and those who simply love our last wild places and want to protect them. The few speakers in favor of the mine could only summon feeble arguments based on speculative profits that don’t take into account the endless years of publicly-funded cleanup associated with the usual mega-mine boondoggles.

It’s time to say NO to greed, environmental devastation, and bowing down at the material altar. Sign this petition to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson and U.S. President Barack Obama. If you’re an angler, you can sign this Trout Unlimited petition and let your voice be heard. Haven’t you had enough of these business-as-usual scams already?

Photo at top: Ben Knight

Fettuccine Alfredo with Smoked Salmon & Asparagus

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ONE OF MY kids’ favorite camp meals is Tuna Noodle Surprise. We gussied up this classic comfort meal with pink salmon right out of the smoker, fresh fettuccine, alfredo sauce, and asparagus. 
 
9oz fresh fettuccine
1/4 lb (or more) smoked salmon, cut into bite-size pieces
1/4 lb asparagus, cut into 3-inch segments
4 tbsp butter
1 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup grated parmesan
fresh-ground black pepper
grated nutmeg to taste
 
Melt butter over medium heat in a small saucepan and whisk in cream. Reduce until slightly thickened. Add smoked salmon and several grindings of pepper to sauce. Meanwhile, cook pasta. Add asparagus to boiling pasta water for last minute or two of cooking, depending on thickness of asparagus. Drain pasta and asparagus. Toss in large bowl with the sauce, salmon, and parmesan cheese. Season with salt and a few grindings of nutmeg.
 
This can all be accomplished quite handily on a Coleman two-burner camp stove. Heck, you could make it on a single-burner stove. The salmon smokes up easier at home when you have a couple hours to kill and a six-pack of Rainier, but even that task could probably be managed on the camp stove with a sheet of aluminum foil and a few twigs of green alder. Eating well in camp is an art form, after all.
 

High Tide Soup

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Recently I had the pleasure of hanging out with a couple mad scientists of the kitchen in Washington’s San Juan Islands. Eric (besides being an ’80s pop aficionado and rapper-in-training) is a sous chef at Blueacre Seafood in Seattle and Scott is a software developer by day and the proprietor of the restlessly inventive Seattle Food Geek blog the rest of the time. It was my job to supply these two gastronomic alchemists with foraged wild foods so they could do their culinary magic.

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m mostly about comfort food, the kind you can make in your own kitchen without an arsenal of specialized tools and exotic ingredients. I don’t pretend to be a trained chef or a molecular gastronaut. But I like to eat, and I’m open to all forms of eating. On Lopez Island Eric turned me on to a soup he likes to call High Tide because it evokes the sea with all its shifting flotsam and jetsam.

Despite the “high concept” appearance, this dish is right in my wheelhouse. First of all, it takes the principles of nose to tail eating, which we generally associate with landed livestock, to the oceans, where most of our prey is still wild yet diminishing. The backbone of the soup, so to speak, is the backbone of a salmon, the sort of leftover piece that usually gets chucked in the trash if not used for crab bait. Not in my house. It was the backbone of a silver salmon that supplied the meat for the risotto Hank Shaw made at my house, and my Salmon Head Soup distinguished itself enough to be included in the Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook.

This time around the salmon was a pink, or humpy, as it’s also known, and its backbone was the key ingredient in a satisfyingly complex salmon broth. A quick word on pinks: at one time, when the rivers of the Northwest teemed with salmon, the pink was reviled in comparison to its more toothsome cousins, the chinook, sockeye, and silver. Now it’s the most plentiful wild salmon species in Puget Sound and demands our gustatory attention. Though not as versatile as its fattier relatives, pinks are still worthy with the right preparation.

The “meat” of the soup was entirely vegetarian—and terrestrial at that. Looking like weird sea creatures washed in by the tide, the leek bottoms and carrot tops, like the salmon backbone, are the sort of things that usually get tossed away. Shaved red cabbage completed the picture. I butter-poached these vegetables in clarified butter for a good 20 minutes or so, until the carrots were tender and the leeks and cabbage slightly caramelized with hints of brown.

It’s impossible to overstate how impressed I was by this soup. The tidal broth was a hit of umami—not too fishy, with an earthy balance of leek flavor—while the sea creatures within absolutely bursted with flavor from the butter-poaching. The carrots tasted like the best sort of stewed carrot and the leek bottoms had a toastiness that was almost as unexpected as the chewy texture of the tentacles…err…roots.

This will be a dish that I serve at the next dinner party.

The Tide

2 small to medium salmon backbones (or 1 large)
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, diced
2 celery ribs, diced
1 tbsp olive oil
3 leeks, just green tops, chopped
1 handful parsley, chopped
1 quart water
salt and pepper, to taste

Saute the onion, carrot, and celery in olive oil until softened. Add water and heat to a low simmer. Add the salmon backbones, leeks, and parsley. Do not allow to boil. Cook at least 2 hours. Adjust seasoning. Strain soup through colander and again through fine mesh and cheesecloth, until clear. Return to pot. Add thinly sliced rounds of leek bulb and keep warm until ready to serve. Cooking the broth at low heat will prevent it from being too fishy, while the leeks—both the green tops and white slices—will balance the flavor, amplifying the wonderfully comfortable umami.

The Sea Creatures

1 stick butter
3 leek bottoms, with roots, rinsed
4-5 carrot tops, with green nub
1 handful shaved red cabbage

Clarify the butter, then in a small sauce pan butter-poach the leek bottoms, carrot tops, and red cabbage for 20 minutes or so, until the cabbage is starting to brown at the edges and the carrots and leeks are tender. Use tongs to turn the vegetables periodically.

Plate the butter-poached vegetables in bowls and ladle broth. Serves 2.

This was just one of 10 courses that Eric prepared with Scott’s help in the islands. I’ll be posting more on this extraordinary feast in the future, when the video treatment is edited.

 

Resident Silvers

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Over the years I’ve caught most of my salmon while standing either in a river or on a beach—I’m just too much of a cheapskate to hire a charter. Last week, though, with Hank and Holly in town, I took a rare opportunity to fish for salmon while standing on a boat. Here’s the funny thing: I was standing on a boat within sight of a public beach where I sometimes stand with rod in hand for free.

But don’t get me wrong: the action was all offshore. The boat was a charter out of Shilshole Marina in Seattle operated by Captain Nick Kester of All Star Fishing Charters and the beach was Golden Gardens. Though I didn’t actually get a chance to hoist a rod myself, I watched my boy reel in the first of two silver salmon, which was even better.

Just a week before, Riley was building sand castles with his sister a few hundred yards to the east from where we were now trolling flashers and cut-plugged herring. Most of the year the parking lot at Golden Gardens is near empty, but on sun-splashed summer days the park’s sandy waterfront overflows with Seattlites determined to experience the novelty of a day at the beach. I guess I was a little surprised to find out that more than a few salmon charters work the rips right off that beach, too.

The upside of a charter is that your chances of catching fish are about as good as they get; the downside is that you’ll be catching those fish with the aid of down-riggers, which means you’re mostly reeling. At first Riley was baffled by this unfamiliar setup. After the first rod popped and he was called to duty, he saw the plus side. It’s a fact that a guided charter using down-riggers and fishfinders takes a lot of guesswork out of fishing—and it’s also a fact that the live-wire excitement of having a salmon on the line increases exponentially on most days with such advantages.

Resident silvers (aka coho, Oncorhynchus kisutch) are fish that never leave Puget Sound. They hatch in local rivers, rear in the Sound, and return to those same rivers to spawn. While in the Sound they dine on a diet of amphipods and small bait fish, rarely attaining the size of silvers that leave the Sound altogether for the wilderness of the North Pacific. Those silvers, sometimes called “ocean hooknoses,” can be much larger, with the males displaying deeply kyped jaws.

A devoted band of saltwater fly-fishermen pesters the resident silvers for most of the year. Just about any point of land sticking into the Sound can be a possible fly-fishing spot when a combination of tides and currents brings the feeding fish close to shore. The Tacoma Narrows in particular, with its fast-moving currents, is a place where anglers gather to cast from the beach. In spring the resident silvers are trout-sized; as the summer wears on they put on weight and look more like salmon fit for a barbecue, albeit on the small side; by early fall the fish are in a feeding frenzy, a last-ditch effort to fatten up before the spawn. This is when most beach fishermen seek them out. By then the resident silvers are about as big as they’ll get, usually in the four or five-pound range, and the ocean silvers are just arriving, giving the angler a shot at a 12-pounder.

To be honest, fishing for resident silvers with all the advantages of boat, down-rigger, and bait felt a little dirty. In retrospect we probably should have asked the captain to motor a dozen extra miles out to the chinook grounds, where the fish and tackle are more suitably matched. But like a good captain, his first concern was getting his clients—which numbered two Californians prohibited by law in their own state from fishing depleted stocks of silvers—into fish.

That night we ate grilled salmon over risotto in nose-to-tail fashion. Meat from the salmon cheeks went into the risotto, as did the roe. The carcasses made a wonderful broth, some of which we used for the risotto while the rest went into the freezer. Hank had some very nice saffron on hand to tart up the risotto along with white wine, Walla Walla sweet onion, English shelling peas, and lemon zest. A fitting feast after a good afternoon on the water.

Photo at top and second from top by Holly Heyser.

Salmon with Pinot Noir Sauce & Morels

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COLUMBIA RIVER spring chinook and many of the Alaskan salmon stocks happen to be running when the land fish—morels—are biting. No surprise that a fatty, omega 3-laden fish happens to pair very nicely with an earthy mushroom that is equally fleeting in this life.

A Pinot Noir reduction is just the thing to tie these two spring delicacies together in a dance of earth and water.

I used a Copper River sockeye for this purpose along with morels foraged in Washington’s central Cascades. The wine was nothing special, though one is always told to not cook with anything that you wouldn’t drink, and the rule holds here.

This recipe is adapted from my friend Becky Selengut’s cookbook, Good Fish. Becky is always razzing me for using too much butter and cream (and she’s right!) but I notice that she’s rather liberal with the butter on this one. In fact, incredibly, I pared the butter back a skosh. The original recipe is for four servings; this is for two. You can get away with a half-stick of butter, though you may choose to add a bit more. 


Sauce
2 tbsp shallot, minced
1/2 star anise
1/2 tsp fennel seeds, lightly crushed
1 tsp honey
2 cups chicken stock
2 cups Pinot Noir
4 tbsp cold unsalted butter

1/2 lb wild salmon fillet
olive oil
salt & pepper
1/4 lb morels, halved
butter

1. To make sauce, combine sauce ingredients in large pan and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer until reduced to 1/4 cup, about 30 minutes. Strain through fine wire mesh and return to pan. Whisk in butter over medium heat until sauce is syrupy.

2. Meanwhile pre-heat oven on broil. Brush salmon fillets with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place salmon skin side down on aluminum foil on baking sheet, within 6 inches or so of heating element. The rule of thumb is 10 minutes of broiling per inch of thickness; I usually cook salmon less than the rule of thumb.

3. Saute morels separately in a small pan with butter.

4. Spoon sauce onto warm plate, place salmon over sauce, and shower with morels.

Into the Elwha

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Say wha’? The Elwha River Valley, on the north end of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. 
 
Last week I backpacked into the Elwha Basin in Olympic National Park to see the place before it undergoes profound change next year. You see, in 2011 the process of undamming the Elwha will begin in earnest and five species of Pacific salmon will have a chance to re-colonize a river that historically supported large fish runs. Since most of the watershed is within the boundaries the park, the habitat remains in good shape and there are great expectations for filling the river once again with fish.
 
With this in mind, I decided a trip into the Elwha to see the place before the dams come down would be a good thing, a way to compare the before and after. My timing looked bad, though. Local weather guru Cliff Mass was telling his blog readers that this was a week to stay out of the mountains. A dreaded marine layer was headed our way from the Pacific with a forecast of rain every day for a week. Pigheaded as usual, I hoisted my pack anyway and walked directly into the teeth of the storm. 
 
The rain held off and that first evening I made it as far as the Lillian River, a major tributary, and a dark, dank foreboding place to make camp. Rodents pestered my tent all night but fortunately, with my food bags hung safely from a bear wire, nothing larger. The next  day I got deeper into the valley, leaving behind the popular destination Elkhorn Camp at the 10-mile mark to penetrate another six miles up-valley to where the Hayes River meets the Elwha. It was around Hayes that I felt civilization’s shackles start to loosen—and here is an important lesson known to serious backpackers: go deep. Your destination may be labeled wilderness or national park, but the essence of the wild doesn’t kick in until you’re suitably removed from the trappings of town. In this case I was 16 miles up a trail and another dozen or so miles inside a national park boundary before the magic of the back-country began to percolate. 
 
And percolate it did. Beyond Hayes the trees got bigger and the forest took on an enchanted quality. A lush carpet of moss covered everything. Winds whistled down from surrounding peaks carrying with them the sounds of glaciers creaking and melting. The river brawled through steep canyons. A fallen tree across the trail was as tall as me in its prone position; someone had counted the rings and noted them on the cut: 560 years old, this tree was a sapling here a generation before Columbus set sail for the New World. 
 
On Day 3 I left base camp to hike another 11 miles into the valley, making for a 22-mile day. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the headwaters but the weather finally caught up to me. It rained all day and the mountains remained mostly hidden, socked in with fog. I had to settle for close-in views of the Elwha Basin and a look at a tumbling, roaring river that gouged out its banks and stacked enormous logjams of old-growth Douglas-fir like cordwood. In this way the river looked nearly perfect on the surface. But I knew that deep within those dark blue pools behind the logjams—ideal shelter for salmon fry—the currents were empty of anadromous fish. For now.

At Happy Hollow, the last shelter on the trail before it becomes a climbing route, I ran into three trekkers who had just come down from the Bailey Traverse, a famous bushwhack through a remote range in the Olympics that has never seen a designated trail. The trekkers had a fire going to dry their gear and seemed both exhilarated from their multi-day expedition and glad to be found. They had spent a full day lost in the hills and told me they were two days behind schedule and worried that a search party might be sent after them. I agreed to notify a ranger of their whereabouts on my way out.

 
The mushrooms were just starting to pop and they seemed to grow right in front of my eyes, the shiny red caps of Russulas emerging where there had been only moss just a few hours earlier, and hedgehogs clustering in the darkest patches of forest. I made dinner with a medley of wild mushrooms, including chanterelles, lobsters, and hedgehogs. I also caught rainbow trout and released them back into the river where they will seed the future stocks of steelhead that will hopefully reclaim the river once the dams are gone.
 
Trips like this got me foraging in the first place and when I reemerged on Day 5 to find my car in the parking lot, the spell of the wild was still on me. I drove back to Seattle in a daze, blissfully unaware of the traffic, neon signs, and hurly-burly of the city, at least for a little while.

Smoked Salmon

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IT’S EASY TO get worked up over all the possibilities for smoked salmon.

My advice? Stick to basics. A simple dry brine of brown sugar, salt, pepper, and garlic is really all you need, 

4 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup pickling salt
1 head garlic cloves peeled & chopped
black pepper to taste

1. Mix the dry brine ingredients.

2. Generously cover each piece of salmon, then place skin-up in a non-reactive dish. Refrigerate overnight. The brine will become a soupy mess by morning.

3. Gently rinse off each piece and allow to air-dry on paper towels for two to four hours until a pellicle forms—the tacky (not wet) outer layer of flesh that is so loaded with flavor and helps seal in moisture when the fish is smoking.

4. For the actual smoking I use a Weber “Bullet,” but it’s possible to employ a regular gas grill in a pinch. A water pan is essential for keeping the fish from drying out. For wood chips I like to use fruit trees: apple or cherry. Alder is good too. If not green, the chips need to be immersed in a bucket of water for 30 minutes, then tossed on the coals in handfuls throughout the smoking process. Everyone has their own theories about temperature and smoking duration. Hot smoking will always be quicker than cold smoking. I try to keep the smoker below 250 degrees, and for smaller species like silvers and pinks this means about an hour and a half of smoking.

5. The last step is vacuum-sealing. I’ve kept properly packaged smoked salmon in the freezer for two years without any appreciable loss of flavor or tenderness.

Blackberry Must & Citrus Cured Salmon

Another option is cured salmon. While making blackberry wine I saved the leftover must to cure fresh salmon. 

2 lb salmon fillet(s)
3/4 cup pickling salt
1 cup brown sugar
1 each zest of a lemon, lime & orange
1 teaspoon peppercorns
1 sprig thyme
1 bay leaf
1 cup blackberry must*

* If you happen to have some blackberry must laying around, by all means use it. If not, the rest of the ingredients make an excellent cure on their own.

Mix all ingredients minus the must in a food processor. Next add the must a little at a time, enough to color the cure but not so much as to make it soggy. Spread a thick layer of cure on bottom of non-reactive dish, up to 1/4 inch. Lay salmon, skin side up, on top of cure, then pack remaining cure on top of the salmon. Cover salmon with plastic wrap and weight down with a few pounds (e.g., cans from the cupboard). Flip salmon in 12 hours. Salmon is finished after 24 hours. Rinse and dry.

The cured salmon will be darker, with an attractive, slightly purple hue from the must, plus there will be a smattering of blackberry seeds that give it extra texture. Slice thinly off the top and eat within a week. I had mine on pumpernickel with a dollop of creme fraiche and chives.

 

Salmon Head Soup

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DESPITE A LONG list of ingredients and a double strain, this is actually a fairly easy soup to make.

2-3 salmon heads, cut in half
2 tbsp peanut or vegetable oil
1 tsp sesame oil (optional)
1 3-inch thumb of ginger, peeled and sliced
2 leeks, tops discarded, chopped
4 green onions, chopped
4-5 cloves garlic, chopped
2 Thai red peppers, thinly sliced
Chinese cooking wine
2 tbsp fish sauce (optional)
rice vinegar (optional)
aji-mirin (optional)
1 can Szechuan prepared vegetable (optional)
1 can bamboo shoots
1/2 head Napa cabbage, shredded
1 handful cilantro for garnish, stemmed, with stems reserved
1 package Asian noodles (e.g., udon, soba, ramen)

1. Over medium-high heat, brown fish heads and ginger in oil for a few minutes, turning at least once. De-glaze pot with a splash of wine and add chopped leeks, garlic, and half the green onions and red peppers. Saute together for several minutes.

2. De-glaze pot again with another splash of wine, then add 8 cups of water and optional fish sauce. Bring to a light boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 30 minutes.

3. Strain contents, picking and reserving as much salmon meat as possible. Return soup to simmer. Adjust for salt. Add half the remaining green onion and the cilantro stems. (Optional seasoning: Add a tablespoon of each: Chinese wine, rice vinegar, aji-mirin; add a few heaping tablespoons of Szechuan prepared vegetables.) Simmer another 15-30 minutes.

4. Strain soup a second time and return to low heat to keep warm. Dole out reserved salmon meat into bowls, along with noodles, a handful of shredded cabbage, and spoonfuls of both Szechuan prepared vegetables (optional) and bamboo shoots. Ladle soup. Garnish with green onion, cilantro, and Thai red pepper. Serves 4.

Chicken and Chanterelles in Tomato Madeira Sauce

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THIS IS A SIMPLE recipe for when you’ve been out all day foraging and get home late—but still want to enjoy your fresh bounty.

4 thin chicken cutlets
flour
butter
2 tbsp olive oil
1 shallot, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1/2 pound chanterelles, sliced
2 tbsp tomato paste
madeira wine
8 oz shaped pasta like penne
parsley, chopped

1. Saute diced shallot and garlic in olive oil. Add chopped chanterelles and cook until mushrooms release their water. Season to taste. Meanwhile add penne pasta to salted boiling water.

2. Add 2 tablespoons of tomato paste to mushroom sauce and stir. In a separate pan, sauté thin, floured  chicken cutlets in butter.

3. Finish tomato-chanterelle sauce with madeira wine and add water as necessary.

4. Serve chicken over pasta and ladle sauce on top. Garnish with chopped parsley.

Paying Out the Last Silver

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With a heavy heart (and salivating chops) I defrosted the last of my silver salmon this afternoon. According to my laundry marker scrawl on the shrinkwrap, this fish was caught September 9th, a Sunday. I actually remember that day, because I caught two silvers within a span of 15 minutes. It had been a lazy Sunday and I didn’t show up at the beach until right before low tide, which was around noon. The sun was out, but it was windy, with uncharacteristically large waves crashing on the cobbles. I had to take my place at the end of the line, far from the point, and, I was sure, far from the sweet spot. Because it was Sunday few of the regulars were around, just a bunch of weekend warriors tossing their lures out and hardly bothering to reel them back in. They didn’t expect to catch anything, I could see that right away. They were hiding from chores and honey-do lists.

Just then I saw an interesting sight through my polarized lenses: plain as day, a pod of silvers zipped by in the curl of a wave mere yards offshore, fin to fin like a squadron of Blue Angels in tight formation. I turned to the guy next me. Am I seeing things? He couldn’t summon the energy to answer and robotically cast his line way over the salmon, fifty yards out to sea (this was better than painting the garage, that’s for sure). A few minutes later and the squadron was back. I put my lure in front of the pod, just a few yards out. A fish peeled off the group and hammered it in less than a foot of water. Seconds later I had a six-pound silver on the beach.

The guy next to me was surprised. “Wow, you got one,” he said, as if we were all assembled there for some obscure reason that had yet to be revealed to us. Five minutes later and I had my second. A limit.

I guess we ate one of the two fish for dinner that night and froze the other for later. Now is later. The last of my freezer full of silver salmon.

In truth, this one has probably been in the freezer longer than is optimal. Three months, no problem. Almost five months? That requires my emergency “freezer burn marinade.” Besides masking the burn without compromising the tender salmon flavor, it’s ridiculously easy to make, taking about 30 seconds, including the time to rummage through my cabinets: one part Mongolian fire oil, two parts roasted sesame oil, and soy sauce to cover. Chopped garlic and ginger (or, in this case, rosemary) give it extra zing—and a couple minutes more prep time.

Such a marinade encourages a Pan-Asian presentation (I know, I know, we’ve seen enough of this sort of thing around these parts lately, but you work with what you’ve got). My usual sides are julienned vegetables—zucchini, squash, onions—sautéed in the same marinade, and jasmine rice or cous-cous. A salsa of diced red pepper, red onion, mango, and cilantro also pairs nicely.