Make The Crispiest Fish Ever With A Slice Of Bread — Yes, Bread

Freshly fried, grilled, or baked salmon with a crispy exterior and tender interior is a culinary pleasure when it's done right. Cooking salmon perfectly can be tricky: Undercooked, and it's mushy. Overcooked, and it's dry. The difference can come down to a couple of extra minutes in the oven. One easy way to help ensure a perfect cook is by crusting the salmon with something like bread crumbs, brown sugar, or Parmesan cheese. That's one of the many tips in our comprehensive guide to cooking and eating salmon. But there's another simple way to achieve a crispy crust that involves a slice or two of brioche bread. It seems like a combo that shouldn't work, but even professional chefs rely on it.

Chef Adrienne Cheatham, author of the cookbook "Sunday Best: Cooking Up the Weekend Spirit Every Day" that features a brioche-crusted salmon recipe, credits Laurent Gras, a French-trained chef who has worked in Chicago and New York for popularizing this technique, particularly in restaurants. Essentially, you cut a piece of bread to the size of the salmon fillet, then cook the two together. Gras opts for sourdough, but Cheatham likes brioche for its enriched dough, made soft and rich with butter, sugar, and eggs, which add flavor and moistness. The technique creates a heat buffer, resulting in rich, tender salmon with a crusty exterior. It also provides a bit of wiggle room on cooking times, especially if you're making a lot of fillets.

All you need for this tip are fresh salmon fillets and a loaf of unsliced brioche bread. Remove the bread crust, then slice the loaf longways into inch-thick pieces. The bread acts as a buffer when you start the cooking process, and provides a toasty crunch when serving the dish, elevating the whole thing to restaurant status.

Lay a slice of bread on a cutting board. Add the fish flat side down on top of the bread. This allows you to cut the bread to the exact size of each fillet, which is attractive and helps when it's time to flip the fish. Cooking the fish involves two steps. First, fry the fillets, brioche-side down, in an oven-safe pan. An oil-and-butter — consider garlic butter for the added flavor — combo in the pan helps toast the bread evenly (and reduce its thickness a bit). Once the bread is toasty but not burnt, flip the fish flesh side down, and stick the whole thing in a medium-hot oven. In a few minutes, depending on the salmon's thickness, the dish will be ready to plate, bread-side up. Breaking through the toasty, crusty bread to get to the moist salmon is an elegant sensory study in texture, aroma, and flavor contrasts that will leave you, and any dinner party guests, awestruck.

There are several stress-free perks that come with salmon crusting technique, according to Adrienne Cheatham: The bread doesn't have to be fresh and any bread will work. Make individual bread slices thick or thin as you prefer. You can use your favorite seasonings or marinades on the salmon. Salmon's natural albumin — the white ooze you sometimes see — helps stick the fish to the bread for easier flipping and eating (avoid pre-brining the salmon too long, as that prevents the ooze, which you don't want to do in this case).

Both prep and cook times for this method are flexible. You can build the whole thing an hour or so in advance and stick the fillets in the fridge until you're ready. If, once the fish has baked, there are undercooked bits of bread, you can flip each uneven fillet again and cook the bread a couple of minutes in the still-hot oil. You can even par-cook this dish for a large party: Simply fry the bread-side down first as usual, then place the unfinished fillets, flesh-side up, on a baking tray. Stick everything in the fridge until you're ready to finish cooking and bake the fish on the tray instead of in the pan. On the other hand, if everything is done before you're ready to serve, slide fillets out of the pan onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven to re-warm the fish quickly. The salmon will remain crispy on the outside and tender flaky on the inside, and your guests will be amazed.