Chef at Home: Delicious Miso Crusted Salmon Fillets

If you've been following us, you'll know that we cooked up a kick-ass 5-course dinner for my mum to celebrate Mother's Day. One of the main courses was the Miso Crusted Salmon, so today we'll be giving you the full recipe so you can cook it too!

The recipe we got this from initially called for Cod. Sadly we couldn't find any non-frozen cod fish, so we went for salmon instead, and it actually turned out very well!

Ingredients:
- Salmon Fillets
- Mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine used for cooking, we bought ours at a 100Yen shop)
- Sugar
- Miso


You'll notice from the pic above that since we couldn't find plain miso-in-a-container, and since time was running short, we improvised and bought a pack of instant miso soup instead. It serves the same purpose, just remember to discard (or keep for another day) the tofu and seaweed that comes in the pack.

Anyways, bring 100ml of mirin to a boil, then lower the heat to simmer. Stir in 200g of miso paste - once that's dissolved stir in 100g of sugar until that's dissolved, then take off the heat. Let the mixture cool to room temperature.


Wash your salmon fillets and remove any scales/bones that the fishmonger might have missed out, and slather generously in the sugar-mirin-miso concoction.


As you can see below, we've used a funky individual plastic-bag wrap for each fillet, but that was because we sort of didn't notice that we'd run out of plastic cling wrap. You can use whatever you fancy - spoon/pour any leftover sugar-mirin-miso into the plastic and then marinate the fish in the fridge for at least half a day (preferably overnight or up to 2 days).


When it's time to cook, take the salmon fillets out of the fridge. Use your fingers to wipe off any excess sugar-mirin-miso mixture off the fish, but do not rinse. Toss the fillets into a hot frying pan for a minute or two on each side (just enough to sear the miso to give the fish a slight crust, then bake in a pre-heated oven at 200 deg C for about 10 minutes.

That's it! Easy and quick. Trust us when we say this fish is delicious. The mirin and the miso marinade imparts a hint of sweetness to the salmon, and the sear before bake ensures that the fish retains a ton of juice. The resulting fillet has a slightly firm/crusty surface, but is just juicy all over inside.


So go ahead and try it for yourself! Preparation and cooking time are 10-15 minutes each, and you can prep in the morning before work, toss the salmon into the fridge, then come back home and it'll be ready for you to sear/bake and eat a delicious restaurant-quality salmon fillet.

(Unfortunately, mirin contains alcohol, so not strictly halal. Alcohol burns off during the cooking process though.)

Click here for our blog page Cooking Classes for more recipes. Hope you will be inspired~