Mirin Glazed Salmon

After my previous success at cooking salmon at home I have become a salmon convert. Poor D. I'm all about salmon, all the time. We bought some fresh fillets and then I made him wake up early to go to one of the Sunday markets so I could buy 1kg of frozen salmon fillets for $20. Bargain.

So, there's now a lot of salmon knocking about in my fridge/freezer. I think I would have been happy just eating Martha's soy glazed salmon steaks with sesame green beans over and over, but I thought I should put some effort into trying other recipes too. This is how this recipe came about. It may look the same as the soy glazed salmon (I loved the sesame green beans too much to forgo them) but it tasted quite different.

The fillet is marinated in mix of mirin, brown sugar and soy sauce and then cooked in a frypan. I didn't like this method. My marinade started burning started burning long before my salmon was cooked. This is purely because my stove has two settings - off and nuclear - but I wasn't comfortable with it and the salmon turned out to be undercooked. I threw it back in the pan and fixed it up, but using Martha's grill method I had perfectly cooked salmon first try. Next time, I going back to grilling.

I served this with some sushi rice per Nigella's suggestion, and the marinade compliments the sushi rice wonderfully, but by the end of the meal I was finding the marinade so strong and sweet that it was difficult to finish. While Nigella's recipe and Martha's recipe uses the same core flavours, they couldn't taste any more different. I think Martha's was a gentler flavour, though. I did enjoy this, I just liked Martha's better.

Mirin Glazed Salmon
from Nigella.com

60ml mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine)
50g light brown sugar
60ml soy sauce
4 x 125g pieces salmon, cut from the thick part of the fillet so that they are narrow but tall rather than wide and flat
2 x 15ml tablespoons rice vinegar
1–2 spring onions, halved and shredded into fine strips

1. Mix the mirin, brown sugar and soy sauce in a shallow dish that will take all 4 pieces of salmon, and marinate the salmon in it for 3 minutes on the first side and 2 minutes on the second. Meanwhile heat a large non-stick frying pan on the hob.
2. Cook the salmon in the hot, dry pan for 2 minutes and then turn the salmon over, add the marinade and cook for another 2 minutes.
3. Remove the salmon to whatever plate you’re serving it on, add the rice vinegar to the hot pan, and warm through.
4. Pour the dark, sweet, salty glaze over the salmon and top with the spring onion strips.
5. Serve with rice or noodles as you wish, and consider putting some sushi ginger on the table, too.

ADDITIONAL INFO FROM NIGELLA

My favourite accompaniment here is sushi rice, and since I am wedded to my rice cooker, this is no work and needs no skill whatsoever. Just cook rice of your choice – or noodles if you prefer- according to the instructions on the packet if, cruelly, you are rice cookerless.