12 Reasons to Make Salmon Your Supper Superstar

A few years back, community member Ashley Couse uploaded a salmon recipe to Food52. The preparation was simple—just roast the salmon and place it over a bed of roasted kale and sweet potatoes, laced with coconut oil and drizzled with sriracha. Couse, who administers an online wellness resource for new moms, adapted the recipe from one of Heidi Swanson’s and calls the recipe “one of [her] favorite meals to serve.”

What Couse probably didn’t expect was that thousands—thousands!—of other visitors to our site would find her recipe equally appealing. Since its upload, Couse’s recipe for Crispy Coconut Kale with Roasted Salmon and Coconut Rice has garnered over 2,000 favorites and drummed up over 100 comments, making it one of our site’s most popular recipes.

Couse’s recipe is, by all means, delicious, but there are, forgive us, other fish in the sea. We’ve got a whole slew of approaches and no shortage of new, inventive ways to treat that ruby red fish. For starters, take Sally Schneider’s Genius approach to slow-roasted salmon, and never worry about an over—or under—cooked fillet again.

Why not try your hand at a glaze or crust? These options bring an extra layer of oomph to your fish, which, though great on its own, will take well to a wide array of other flavors. Sprinkle or slather, then pop into the oven.

Try something new: Cure your fish! Once you’ve cured and flavored your salmon, serve the brunch staple atop toasts (or bagels!) with creamy spreads and punchy vegetables.

Shred and pull, mash and reshape! Take your cooked salmon and reshape it into patties or stuff it into dumplings. These may not look like salmon as you know it, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth a try.

How do you salmon? Keep it conservative or twist it up? Let us know how you do in the comments below.