Baked Lemon Pepper Salmon – Sometimes Cooking’s Not Pretty

I wouldn’t exactly call this baked lemon pepper salmon a failed experiment, as the cooking method shown herein is a very useful tool in the ongoing battle against boring salmon; but my attempt to fuse lemon and pepper flavor onto the surface with a quick pickling suffered from lack of sweetness. 

Such is cooking. Live, learn, and occasionally eat too tart and peppery salmon. Anyway, every time we’d post one of our broiled salmon recipes, I’d get emails from people without broilers asking how they can get the same results, so I figured my little trial by acid would make for a good excuse to show how easy baked salmon is. 

As long as you get your oven nice and hot, and aren’t afraid to poke the fish with a fork to check, you should be enjoying tender, moist, flaky meat every time. You can always cook it more, so check after 10 minutes and go from there. If you test in the filet's natural seams, the evidence of your breaking and entering will hardly be noticeable, and easily covered by a sauce or slice of lemon.

If you use my recipe, you may want to adjust the pepper and acidity of the lemon with something on the sweet side. Pretty much any kind of glaze or marinade will work with this easy technique, and many of them (most of them) will look better than this. I hope you give this a try soon. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 2:
two 8-10 oz center-cut salmon filets, boned, skin on

2 tbsp lemon juice

1 tbsp black pepper

1 tsp miso paste

2 tsp mustard

1 1/2 tbsp mayo

cayenne to taste

salt to taste

*Next time I’ll add some Hoisin sauce or something sweet to balance the flavors better.
Bake at 450 degrees F. 10-15 min or until done.

View the complete recipe