Butter Poached Salmon Recipe - Salmon with Horseradish-Dill Cream (2024)

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I like poached salmon, I really do. But I really like butter poached salmon.

You generally don’t see a lot of recipes for poached food on this site. The reason is because I am generally a slave to the crispy; if I had a child I’d name him Maillard… if my kid happened to be a French boy overly fond of browning reactions. Salmon and trout are different.

To me, most water or wine-poached fish always tastes thin, like spa food. But you can of course poach things in liquids other than broth or water. Like fat, or oil. Now we’re talking. If you’ve ever eaten butter-poached salmon — or butter-poached anything — it will change your mind about poaching.

What you see here is a classic: King salmon, very gently cooked in sweet butter, served with a bangin’ sauce of sour cream, horseradish and dill. A little freshly cracked black pepper adds one more level of zip. It is simple, but so damn good!

You might notice that these portions of fish are big. Holly and I had zero trouble knocking it back. For some reason the silky, butter-poached salmon just seemed to go down so easily, and the sour cream mixture added all the outsized flavors we prefer. Oh, and you do need the freshly cracked black pepper: It adds needed texture.

You will note that there are three methods of cooking the salmon in this recipe. I happen to have a sous vide precision cooker, which lets me set a precise temperature so I can cook things perfectly. They are an awesome tool to have, especially for a fish and game cook.

That said, even an inexpensive one will run you $80 or so. Fortunately, most anglers and hunters also have a vacuum sealer, and you can seal up some salmon with a little butter and cook it in a big pot of hot water to basically do the same thing.

Finally, there is the traditional method, which involves submerging the salmon in lots of butter (or oil) until it’s just barely cooked. I’ve poached salmon in all three ways and they’re all good.

You’ll also notice a wide range of timing for the cooking.

This hinges on a) how thick your salmon is, and b) how cooked you like your fish. If you are using farmed salmon, you can serve it very rare if you’d like. For wild salmon, I would only serve it rare-to-medium if the fish had been flash frozen first: This kills any possible parasites that can sometimes be in salmon. Raw wild salmon is mostly safe, but not always. For the record, I use king salmon and I like it cooked medium.

This dish looks subtle, but it ain’t. A good dish to serve with your butter poached salmon would be my Nordic salmon chowder.