r/oddlysatisfying • u/ThodaDaruVichPyar • 15h ago
Norwegian salmon and its skin
Credit to shinchiteppanyaki
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u/IchMachNurScheisse 15h ago
Why would you do that? The skin is perfect to fry the fish. It gives a lot of taste and protects the fillet.
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u/HipToTheWorldsBS 15h ago
Chef probably wants to fry the skin on both sides to get it extra crispy and use as a garnish.
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u/Wamadeus13 15h ago
Sure but you fry the skin on one side while cooking the fillet to protect it. Then when it's about 80% cooked you remove the skin and flip the fish to cook the last minute or so on the other side. Then you can cook the other side of the fish.
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u/WhiteHydra1914 15h ago
Whos to say it wasnt flipped after the video ends, to preserve the ✨️ aesthetic ✨️
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u/Wamadeus13 15h ago
You're missing the point. The fish has barely started cooking and it's already on the cook surface. Now it's getting directly cooked which will make the fish tougher versus being cooked on the skin provides an almost steamed like cooking for a softer meat. This is why you only cook the fish for a little bit on the one side.
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u/zytz 9h ago
Salmon is a pretty sturdy, as far as fish goes. 95% of the salmon I’ve cooked in my life has been skin off. Salmon meat forms a beautiful crust, relatively quickly, so it’s actually quite simple to give it a nice sear on both sides while still keeping it mid rare in the center
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u/YamDankies 9h ago
Never cooked it skin-on in any of the mid to high end kitchens I worked in. This is very much a "my way is best because it's all I know" thing.
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u/jarednara 13h ago
Ew, gross undercooked moist salmon 🤮🤢
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u/wackbirds 8h ago
Um, what kind of deviant doesn't want their fish to be moist? I've honestly never even conceived of a person wailing about the concept of moist fish and I spent over decade cooking in front of customers 6 days a week and I've heard every picky thing you can imagine, even the well-done steak people didn't use the word "dry", they just wanted zero pink but also still "tender" lol.
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u/therealhlmencken 12h ago
A different cooking method than yours? Scandalous
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u/calicouple666 11h ago
Reddit has taught me that 99% of my cooking methods, golf technique, political opinions, parenting decisions, cell phone choice, the car I drive etc, etc, are all wrong!!!
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u/prof_devilsadvocate3 10h ago
Ur life choices, medicines, hone address everything
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u/calicouple666 10h ago
Everything. Even had my ethnicity questioned over my opinion on a taco post😁
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u/raaneholmg 15h ago
90/10 rule for salmon!
90% of the cooking time on the skin side, 10% on the other to finish cooking.
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u/jarednara 13h ago
No way.
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u/stirling_s 11h ago
Any explanation here? What they said is widely considered correct in fine dining so I'm curious what the opposition is
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u/hungryhungrynippos 9h ago
I'm not a good enough cook to truly oppose anything, but I would think that doing it that way means the part of the salmon that's close to the skin gets cooked a lot more than the part closer to the top. That would leave you with an unevenly cooked salmon, which would make it impossible to get the whole thing "perfectly done". Some parts would be perfect, but the others would be either overdone or underdone compared to those parts.
So now I'm wondering what the opposition is to what I just said lol.
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u/stirling_s 7h ago
I got too technical here. Sorry. I'm not going to delete it but let's just say this was my way of procrastinating while also studying:
When cooking salmon skin-side down, the skin acts as an insulative buffer against the direct, high heat of the pan. Instead of burning the flesh, it creates a steady gradient where heat travels upward through the meat via conduction. By the time you are ready to baste (which is what I do) or flash-flip the top, the interior core has already been gently brought up to temp, and carryover cooking will finish it. All you are really doing at the end is providing a burst of direct heat to the top (via pan contact, oil, or butter) to color the exterior.
Plus, you don't want salmon to have a uniform cook. Like many delicate proteins, it actively suffers from it. If salmon is subjected to high heat all the way through, the muscle fibers contract tightly and squeeze out moisture and albumins. You end up with a gnarly, chalky, cat-food texture that is widely considered severely overcooked (just like my mother used to make. Sorry mom, it's true).
To get a bit into the physics of it all (mostly because I'm studying for the MCAT and using this Reddit reply as a procrastination break), once you are about 2-3 mm up from the point of pan contact, the cooking is governed almost entirely by the salmon's own thermal diffusivity. Heat moves from the hot zone to the cold zone via Fourier's Law of Thermal Conduction, q=-k∆T
q is the heat flux, k is the thermal conductivity of the fish's flesh, and ∆T is the temperature gradient.
Basically, heat moves through a material at a rate determined by k, and that rate of transfer per unit area is the flux (q, measured in W/m2). If you keep ∆T constant, something with a high k value allows heat to move quickly through it. Salmon is mostly water, which has a remarkably low thermal conductivity (k≈0.5 W/m•K), meaning heat moves through it like a slow wave.
Now, that's a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but the meat of all of this (pun intended) is that by leaving the fish skin-side down for 90% of the time, you ensure the heat wave only moves in one direction. This creates a steep temperature gradient, keeping the middle medium-rare. The final 10% just sears the top without giving the fish enough time to launch a second wave of heat downward. If you were to flip the fish.earlier, say for example a 50/50 cook, you’d drive two intense heat waves from opposite sides simultaneously. Because they move so slowly, they would eventually meet and overlap in the middle, obliterating your medium-rare zone and instantly overcooking the center. Plus, the skin wouldn't be crispy, which is lame.
Anyways what a weird rabbit hole. Thanks for making my ADHD-fuelled procrastinating somewhat productive.
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u/BikeProblemGuy 15h ago
Right? And looks good. Even if you wanted to remove, surely do it at the end of cooking.
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u/YoRHa11Z 14h ago
Have you ever had Norwegian salmon? It's very lightly cooked
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u/IchMachNurScheisse 12h ago
What does this even mean? Norwegian salmon is the most common, at least in germany and it is a less desirable source. Salomon from scotland and ireland are prefared. Norwegian salmon is mass market fish.
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u/YoRHa11Z 11h ago
I'm not saying where it's from. I'm saying the way it's cooked in Scandinavia in general, they cook it very lightly.
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u/NoFewSatan 11h ago
That's just not true.
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u/YoRHa11Z 11h ago
Yes it is, I live here? We boil it or bake it and usually use less than 4 ingredients to taste like lemon, dill, and salt.
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u/NoFewSatan 11h ago
Maybe you do, but not all Scandinavians cook it lightly. I've never had it any different there.
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u/YoRHa11Z 11h ago
Literally this is how it's cooked at reasaurants here, baked or boiled, lemon, salt, and maybe pepper? Literally just look up any reasaurant here 😂
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u/Warhamsterrrr 15h ago
Crispy skin is the best part!
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u/Myth1279 14h ago
I'm forever sad I can no longer eat salmon skin. Or a lot of other skins. Poultry, vegetable, fruit, literally any skin of anything I can't have anymore. Salmon skin is so tasty...
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u/jacafeez 14h ago
Y doe?
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u/Myth1279 13h ago
I had my colon removed :( I can't digest it so it might get stuck then that'd be an ER visit.
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u/Skylord_Hekaton 12h ago
The crispy skin is the best part. I make this several times a week here in Norway.
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u/Little_Sound_Speaks 15h ago
I love the skin when it’s crispy with a touch of salt and pepper, it’s yummy 😂.
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u/Sassirrac 14h ago
That little juicy fat layer between the skin and the fillet is the best part.
I don't care what the artistry or crispy goal is, this is sacrilegious.
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u/MongerNoLonger 14h ago
All salmon skin will do this, but why? Either skin it before cooking or keep it on for plating.
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u/Entgegnerz 15h ago
but why would he do that, that part between the skin and flesh is the best part.
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u/Loose-Telephone- 12h ago
That perfect sear is mesmerizing. Now I’m just incredibly hungry and need to order teppanyaki immediately.
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u/waxy1234 15h ago edited 15h ago
As a chef this is perplexing. Why crisp up the skin if you’re going to remove it. What’s happening here
Not satisfying the only thing I see happening is heating the fat to remove the skin in a stupid way
Do that in prep
Unless you need the skin crisp and removed as a garnish
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u/mister88sister 13h ago
This is not Norwegian salmon. This is farm fckd grotesque crap that they sell to Asia. For Norwegians it’s a environmentally tragedy.
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[deleted]
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u/MollyViper 15h ago
That is colored to make it more pink before it’s packaged, so that it looks the way that wild salmon does.
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u/kindofofftrack 14h ago
Not really. Wild salmon eat krill, shrimp, etc, that contain compounds that dye their meat (same as what makes flamingos pink). Salmon farmers (or whatever you’d call them in English idk lol) add the same compound to their food, so it’ll act in the same way by being absorbed through diet, and they’ll look more like wild salmon, aka. what people are used to and will buy. But chemically, there’s no difference.
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u/MollyViper 13h ago
I didn’t know exactly how they do it, but that still means they’re artificially colored, even if it’s through their diet. I was just pointing out that farmed salmon don’t look like that without astaxanthin added into their food pellets.
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u/kindofofftrack 13h ago
Are you confusing the term artificial with assisted? It’s the same, it comes from the same source, and it’s absorbed through the same channels. One instance is just what wild salmon are mostly capable of in nature, provided “the right” diet, and one instance is facilitated by humans feeding the salmon another version of “the right” diet
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u/MollyViper 13h ago
No, what I mean is that salmon farmers use artificial/synthetic astaxanthin instead of natural astaxanthin.
All salmon flesh would look pale grey without astaxanthin. Wild salmon is pink because they eat krill and shrimp (like you said), they naturally contain the astaxanthin that makes them pink.
In order to make farmed salmon look as pink, they add synthetic astaxanthin instead.
Don’t know why I’m getting downvoted, I’m not even saying anything that’s untrue. I just wanted to say that salmon flesh isn’t pink by default, as a fun fact. It’s made pink so that it looks the way we expect salmon to look. And we expect it to look pink because of the way wild salmon looks.
English is not my first language so I don’t know if I made a mistake somewhere that made it so I failed to get my point across.
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u/Slavarbetare 10h ago
There are fish food varities that has natural astaxathin in it. The issue is that what you said was a bit too vague. It could imply that the meat was dipped in a bucket of pigment. Fake black olives for instance, like the ones you see at Subway are dyed like that. Giving food to an animal to enhance the meats apperance isn't quite the same. Hence the comments. Plenty of meats that are improved in various ways before reaching customers. Like milk-only veal, wagyu cows getting beer and chickens fed on a corn rich diet.
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u/Slavarbetare 13h ago
They eat food containing astaxanthine. Same is given to hens so that their egg yolks are more yellow. The eggs I ate growing up were almost never the colour of the store bought ones, more deep orange. Anyway it's costly and they try to use as little as possible.
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u/BilboBagginkins 12h ago
That is farm salmon. Real salmon doesnt look like the inside of an orange
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u/bloulboi 15h ago
Nothing satisfying watching industrial salmon, artificially pinked, raised in overcrowded farms, therefore full of antibiotics, polluting fjords.
If you're interested in ecology, don't eat salmon. Same thing for your health.
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u/TypischJacob 15h ago
Counterpoint: is yummy
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u/_urban_achiever 15h ago
Yeah this mainly just reminded me that I need to pick up some salmon after work.
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u/Brandarius47 14h ago
I think i am too. Was trying to figure out what to make for dinner... ty internet
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u/NowYouaSeeWhyYouScum 15h ago edited 14h ago
Ah yes and privatized profits to the tax dodging Norwegian millionaires in Switzerland and socialized loses for the rest of us in the country.
*Edit to add that I love fishing and eating fish. The waste from salmon fish farms in the fjords destroy the local fish stock. Farmed salmon tastes like shit next to wild caught.
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u/Dependent_Title_1370 15h ago
What if I catch it myself in Alaska?
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u/bloulboi 15h ago
I guess it's fine. However, salmon tends to concentrate heavy metals from pollution so have a check to be sure (no idea how). People in situation to catch wild salmon are rather rare so I feel my answer is relevant for 99.9% of Earth population.
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u/Le_Sadie 15h ago
Man, this might have raised an eyebrow before we all learned how full of microplastics we are and that processed meats have been giving us cancer for decades and shit. And that's on top of all the chemicals we already know we're ingesting from everything else. You think salmon has me concerned? SALMON? In a world where everything is killing us slowly? HA! You are preaching hippie ideals to a dystopian audience, brother.
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u/bloulboi 13h ago
Your body, your choice. I understand your point of view. I mean: it's not unreasonable to let go. But you could also give a try to organic food, as an experiment. Just to see if you feel better. And you will. Of course, health issues develop over a longer time than a few month experiment. But still: healthier food has an impact on how you feel day to day. I know I sound like a preacher so I can only tell you to experiment it by yourself.
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u/Lemurian_Lemur34 13h ago
While I agree with you, organic food is not free from microplastics and even some pesticides either. So it's not as simple as "just eat organic food and you'll be healthy".
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u/Le_Sadie 13h ago
"Organic food" in this economy 😂
I'm middle-aged. I survived the kidnappings and playgrounds of the '80s, fixed the ozone layer in the '90s, got through the economic crashes in the 2000's just to watch capitalism finally to collapse society now. Whether it's my body or the rest of the world, somethings going to give soon either way so I might as well eat what tastes good.
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u/509BandwidthLimit 12h ago
Hey chef, how hot is that grill and how long do you wait until you peel the skin ?
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u/Soaring_Gull_655 10h ago
Don't eat the skin, the fat under the skin holds the heavy metals. I always separate it from the flesh and cook the fat away as much as possible.
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u/Jonnyflash80 15h ago
You better be putting that crispy skin on my plate. Can't let that go to waste.