Salt Bake Your Salmon For Perfectly Flaky Results

Despite salmon's immense popularity, it remains a challenging protein for many cooks to master. You want it to have a delicate, flaky texture, but this type of seafood cooks so fast that it's often hard to control and turns out overcooked and tough. Thankfully, there are a few ways to avoid this. Our guide to salmon covers the most common cooking methods, however, there's a lesser-used option that you should consider if you're cooking salmon for a crowd — salt baking.

While you can salt bake various meats, vegetables, and seafood, with origins on the Mediterranean coast, it's most associated with fish. This is a cooking technique that dates back to at least the time of the Ancient Greeks and involves baking foods encased in a thick shell of salt. The sodium crust traps steam, keeping foods tender, and gently seasons throughout the baking process. Building a solid shell of salt around the fish stops moisture from escaping, essentially forming a steam chamber where the fish can cook in its own juices and create a perfectly flaky outcome.

You might not think to turn to your oven for salmon, but it's actually one of the simplest ways to cook fish. You can even bake salmon under a slab of cream cheese, although salt is a more conventional choice. The purpose of encasing this type of seafood in sodium is to retain moisture while it cooks. However, another perk of this method is that it's pretty simple and mostly inactive. You just need a lot of sodium, around two to three pounds of kosher salt for a whole fish. 

To create a coating for the salmon, mix the salt with water until it feels like wet sand, then place a layer of the paste on the bottom of a baking sheet and lay the fish on top of it. You can also season the outside at this point. Lemon and dill are two of the best seasonings that will upgrade your salmon, especially when using the salt-baking method. 

Then pack the rest of the salt around the fish until it is fully encased and bake at around 400 degrees Fahrenheit for roughly 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of your seafood. Don't worry about the salmon tasting too salty. When it's done, you crack the salt shell and remove it, leaving only a gentle level of the seasoning that permeates the fish.