This morning, I returned home from Costco with some frozen, individually quick frozen, wild Alaskan sockeye salmon filets. I love Costco and knew that it wouldn’t let me down again.
In preparation for my upcoming workweek, I already had some pork chops and chicken breasts cooking in my Sous Vide Supreme when I returned. After I removed the cooked meat and submerged them in an ice bath (I’m storing then in the fridge and serving them later in the week), I started thinking about what I else I could make in my SousVide Supreme. Ding! Ding! Ding! I’ll make some salmon!
But can I just throw a frozen pre-vacuum sealed salmon filet directly from the bag into the SousVide Supreme? Damn it, I’m gonna try. I knew the salmon wouldn’t be seasoned in the bag but I didn’t want to go through the trouble of defrosting, seasoning, and re-vacuum sealing. I decided to set the temp of my SousVide Supreme to 120 F for medium rare (I actually had to add some ice and cold water to bring the temp down from 140 F). In terms of how long to leave the salmon in the bath, Douglas Baldwin recommends 15-20 minutes for a thawed refrigerated filet so I opted to leave the salmon in the bath for 25 minutes. It was a small 5 ounce filet that was about ½ inch thick so I was comfortable with 25 minutes.
When I removed the filet from the bath, I dried it off and sprinkled it with freshly ground black pepper and Aleppo chile finishing salt. I heated up my little cast iron skillet on high and added a blob of ghee. When the ghee started smoking, I quickly seared both sides of the filet. When I plated the salmon, I added one last sprinkle of Aleppo chile finishing salt. I served it up with some nuked frozen green beans and squeezed half a lime over everything.
How’d it taste? Not bad – especially for how easy it was! I’m sure it would be tastier if I’d seasoned it first but finishing salts are pretty awesome.
The texture and doneness was great and all I fricking did was dump a vacuum sealed filet DIRECTLY FROM THE FREEZER into my SousVide Supreme, quickly sear it, and sprinkle on some salt and pepper. Does this make up for the tilapia from yesterday?
