There’s more salmon left on the spine than you think, and it might just make the best lunch or appetizer on the boat.
We were anchored in the Octopus Islands when Dave and our friend Bill headed out fishing. This is one of those wonderful parts of the coast where fishing feels like a perfectly reasonable way to spend the morning, particularly when dinner is still an unanswered question. They headed toward Johnstone Strait and came back with a beautiful salmon, which immediately settled the question of what we were eating that night.
As Dave was cleaning the fish, however, he remembered something he’d seen online. This particular blog was about cooking the spine of a salmon after the fillets had been removed. The chef called it something like garbage-can salmon.
It wasn’t a particularly appealing name, but the idea was intriguing.
When you look at a salmon after it has been filleted, the obvious prize is gone. You have two gorgeous fillets ready for the barbecue, and what remains is the head, tail, bones and spine. But when we held it up and looked closely, there was still quite a bit of beautiful salmon attached to the bones.
Why were we throwing that away?
We decided to try the experiment. Bill mixed garlic butter with herbs, Dave seasoned the salmon spine, and we put it all on the barbecue. After a few minutes, we flipped it over, added dollops of Bill’s garlic-and-herb butter, and watched it melt into the salmon. By then, our so-called trash salmon was starting to look suspiciously like something we might actually want to eat.
Once it was cooked, the real surprise was how easily the salmon came away from the bones. Instead of scraping around trying to salvage tiny bits of fish, we were lifting off lovely pieces of salmon. There was far more meat on the frame than I expected, and suddenly what we’d been routinely throwing away looked less like scraps and more like another meal.
That night we ate it in lettuce wraps with salad and fresh vegetables, but I’ve since realized that may be the least interesting part of the discovery. The real beauty of cooking the salmon spine is what you’re left with afterward: a bowl of cooked, flaked salmon that is ridiculously useful on a boat.
It can become lunch the following day without requiring much effort or another trip to the grocery store. I can put it on a green salad, make a simple salmon dip with cream cheese and lemon, serve it with crackers, fold it into pasta or make salmon sandwiches. If we’re cruising for several weeks, I love anything that turns one ingredient into another meal, particularly when that second meal comes from something we previously considered waste.
My favourite use might be a simple salmon sandwich filling. It is exactly the kind of boat recipe I like because the measurements are forgiving and almost everything can be substituted depending on what happens to be in the refrigerator.
Easy Salmon Sandwich Filling
For about two cups of cooked, flaked salmon, I use roughly 1/3 cup of mayonnaise, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard and a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice. I add one finely chopped celery stalk, a couple of tablespoons of chopped green onion and some fresh dill from my boat garden. Add a little salt and freshly ground pepper to finish.
Before mixing everything together, I run my fingers carefully through the salmon to make sure I’ve removed any small bones. Then I gently fold in the mayonnaise, Dijon, lemon, celery and green onion rather than mashing everything together. I want it creamy enough to hold together in a sandwich while still tasting and looking like salmon.
Like most of my boat recipes, nothing terrible happens if you’re missing an ingredient. Chives can replace the green onion. Finely chopped cucumber can stand in for celery. Capers or chopped pickles are delicious additions, and a little hot sauce is never a bad idea. If the mixture seems dry, add another spoonful of mayonnaise; if it seems a little heavy, another squeeze of lemon usually fixes it.
Pile it onto good bread with crisp lettuce, and you have a terrific lunch. It’s also excellent tucked into a wrap or spooned onto crackers when nobody feels like making a proper meal. There is something particularly satisfying about eating it the next day and realizing that lunch essentially came from the part of yesterday’s fish you once would have thrown away.
I think that’s what stayed with me after our little experiment in the Octopus Islands. Catching a salmon is special. It takes time, fuel, fishing gear and, in our case, a morning spent on the water with a good friend. When you think of it that way, using as much of that fish as possible just makes sense.
I’m certainly not going to pretend we invented some revolutionary new way to cook salmon. Dave found an idea online, Bill made some excellent garlic butter, and we put what was essentially a salmon skeleton on the barbecue.
But we learned something.
We still call it trash salmon because the name makes us laugh.
We just don’t put it in the trash anymore.
