Watermelon Marinated Salmon

Watermelon Marinated Salmon

It’s no secret that when fresh salmon is in season, we eat it far more than any other protein. Even though we’re perfectly happy to throw some salt and pepper on it and grill it up plain, we’re always looking for new ways to prepare salmon.

Enter our CSA box this week. We get both a fruit and a vegetable box from Growing Washington and our fruit box contained not one, but THREE different watermelons (per our request). So this week is going to be watermelon week for us. Of course, we’ve eaten our fair share standing over the sink, juices dripping down our chins, spitting seeds into the compost pot, but we’ve also been looking for recipes that use watermelon.

I first thought about making watermelon marinated salmon because I was going to make watermelon gazpacho. However, life sort of got in the way and I ran out of time for the watermelon gazpacho. I’ll get to that tonight. A few quick keystrokes and the magic of Google and I came across this.

Watermelon Marinated Salmon, adapted from FoodReference.com

• 1 piece of salmon
• 4 Tbsp watermelon juice
• 4 Tbsp soy sauce
• 4 Tbsp sake
• Sesame seeds
• A little sesame oil

1. In a glass dish add the watermelon juice, soy sauce, and sake and mix well.
2. Add the salmon and marinate, in the fridge, for at least 2 hours.
3. Remove the salmon from the marinade, brush one side with oil and lay that side down in a baking dish.
4. Sprinkle with sesame seeds.
5. Cook to your liking. Either bake in the oven at 300 for 15-20 minutes, or grill until done.

Our Notes: We both really enjoyed this dish. The salmon was sweet and salty, and it didn’t really need the sesame seeds, but they made for a nice presentation. The original recipe called for fresh ginger, but since that doesn’t grow here, we left it out. Amazingly though, the combination of the sake, the watermelon juice, and the soy sauce produced a gingery flavor anyway.

A few notes on cooking salmon. Albumen, the white stuff that you will often see on a piece of cooked fish, is the fat that is coming out of the salmon. While many of us see it when we cook salmon, ideally, you want to cook the fish until JUST before the albumen starts coming out of the fish. Since this is often difficult, just watch carefully and when you see the first hint of it coming out of the side of the fish, stop the cooking process. Cooking the fish at a low temperature is a method I learned from a local chef and I love the soft texture of salmon when I cook it this way. It has the consistency of sushi, but is fully cooked.