Lemon butter salmon with asparagus
FoodQuick and delicious

Lemon butter salmon with asparagus

You can make the fish, asparagus and a box of instant couscous in 15 minutes flat.

Lemon butter salmon with asparagus (Photo by Jessica Grann)
Lemon butter salmon with asparagus (Photo by Jessica Grann)

When I want to make a really nice dinner, but I’m pressed for time, I turn to this salmon recipe.

I can make the fish, asparagus and a box of instant couscous in 15 minutes flat. It’s important to have a few consistent recipes on hand that are easy to prepare but make your cooking shine. While I use olive oil for most of my recipes, this salmon gets devoured because it’s cooked in real butter; use unsalted butter to keep the butter from burning.

I use barbecue-cut salmon, which means that it is already sliced into nice 2-inch wide pieces that are often on the thicker side. You can buy a pound of salmon and use a sharp knife to cut it into three pieces.

The red pepper in this recipe is more for color than spice — I love how it looks on the plate and it adds warmth to the leftover butter sauce, which I ladle over the asparagus as well. Fresh asparagus is easy to make and cooks quickly, so it’s perfect to pair with this meal.

Ingredients

Serves 2-3
Fish:
1 pound salmon
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 pinch of salt per piece of salmon
1 pinch of Aleppo pepper, or a little less cayenne pepper
Lemon wedges for garnish

Optional butter sauce:
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3-4 tablespoons boiling water
Juice from half a lemon
Sea salt to taste

Asparagus:
1 bunch of asparagus, about 12 ounces
1 teaspoon of sea salt for the cooking water

We’ve all been served asparagus with woody, chewy ends or that has been so overcooked that it turns to mush. I have a few tips to help get the best consistency.

First, asparagus has a natural breaking point in the stalk. If you attempt to break the end off with your hand, it will bend but not break, but if you move your hand an inch or two up the stalk and try to bend it, it will naturally break. I’m not a perfectionist cook so I don’t trim every stalk to match the others.

The second tip is to blanch the asparagus spears in cold water as soon as they are fork-tender. You could use an ice bath, but cold tap water does a nice job. I use a 12-inch sauté pan because it fits a lot of asparagus. After snapping the ends off of the asparagus spears, place them in the pan and cover them with water to soak. If you’re checking asparagus for bugs, you can add some white vinegar to the water. Anything icky tends to float off.

Rinse the asparagus, dump out the soaking water and set the asparagus aside.

Fill the pot with a few inches of water and put it on the stove to boil. Once the water is boiling, add a teaspoon of salt and drop in the asparagus. The water should just cover the asparagus; it’s better to have a little less water and a few popping above the water than to have them fully submerged.

It takes about a minute for the water to come up to a full boil again. Once it does, reduce the heat a bit so that the water is at a medium boiling point. Asparagus can cook quickly depending on thickness. It can cook in 3 minutes or it can take as long as 7-8 minutes. The best time to remove the pan from heat is when the asparagus has turned a bright, spring-green color. Use a dinner fork to pierce the thicker pieces to see if they are soft enough to remove.

Once you take the asparagus off of the stove, immediately dump it into a colander and rinse with cold water for about 2 minutes.

I never add salt or oil to asparagus; I allow sauce from the fish to pool on the dinner plate to season them. Asparagus tastes good at all temperatures, so you can serve it at room temperature if you prefer. You also can add hollandaise sauce.

Rinse the salmon under cold water and press the pieces with a paper towel to soak up extra water before cooking. This will help prevent the butter from splattering excessively. I use salmon with the skin on so my instructions reflect that. The skin has fat, and fat is where the flavor is. Skin also keeps the fish from getting dry. You can remove it before serving if you don’t care to eat it.

Warm a skillet on a medium-low flame for 2-3 minutes. Raise the heat to medium and add 3 tablespoons of cold, unsalted butter to melt, which will take another minute. When the milk solids start to bubble, add the salmon skin side down. A medium flame should keep the butter from burning. Don’t salt the fish before cooking. Add the salt halfway to protect the butter sauce from burning.

After the fish has cooked skin side down for a minute or so, carefully tip the pan so you can spoon the hot butter over the top of the fish. Do this consistently while cooking, setting the pan down to sit flat for 30 seconds, then tipping it to baste the fish again.

Sprinkle the top of the fish with sea salt and red pepper of your choice, which will turn the fish a pretty shade.

After 4 minutes, turn the fish. The top of the fish should be slightly opaque from the hot butter. If the skin separates from the meat, push it to the side. If the skin sticks to the bottom of the pan, let it stay there even if the fish is resting on top of it after flipping it over.

Continue to spoon the butter over the fish for another 2-3 minutes or so. You can check the thickest piece with a digital thermometer. The biggest mistake people make when cooking fish is cooking it too long and it dries out. Food safety requirements suggest an internal temperature of 140 F. I remove it from the pan when it’s at 136 F. Any fish or meat keeps cooking when removed from heat, so it will hit 140 F while resting. There will be some leftover butter in the pan that you can spoon over the plated fish.

To make a quick lemon butter sauce:
Once you remove the fish from the pan, keep the heat at medium and add 3 more tablespoons of cold unsalted butter, which should melt in about a minute.

Stir the butter with a wooden spoon and scrape the sides and bottom of the pan. The butter will have a golden color from the red pepper.

Add in the juice from half a lemon to deglaze the pan. Stir well for a minute and then add 3-4 tablespoons of boiling water.

Stir or whisk constantly for another minute or two then remove it from the heat.

This is not a true sauce so it won’t fully emulsify, but it will give you a silky butter sauce to spoon over the fish and asparagus.

Regardless of whether you make the optional sauce, serve this with fresh lemon wedges for extra zing.

This sauce will start to solidify if left to sit out and must be warmed again before serving if made in advance.

I often make this with boxed couscous, which only takes 10 minutes to cook.

Enjoy and bless your hands! PJC

Jessica Grann is a home chef living in Pittsburgh.

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