I was scrolling through Instagram recently when a piece of salmon posted by my friend Kate Consenstein caught my eye. What was this? A fillet slathered in mayo and covered in potato chips? It seemed a little wrong, but then if Kate, who knows seafood better than most, was making it, perhaps it was secretly a lot right?
Alaskan cooks are always combining wild food with self-stable, lowbrow pantry items. See: muktuk and Lawry’s Seasoned Salt or saltine salmon or wild berries suspended in Jell-O atop a layer of box sheet cake or crab boiled in 7-Up or agutuk with Cool Whip. For my book, I spent a lot of time with Alaska’s community and church cookbooks, especially those from the mid-20th Century, and I can attest to the generous use of both mayo and crushed potato chips, especially in seafood casseroles. But this recipe? It felt bold.
Kate lives nearby, so we went for a socially distant mid-winter walk and talked about that feeling you get in the late winter, when you’re trying to come up with a new way to cook last season’s frozen salmon on a Tuesday night. This recipe is aimed right at that. The one Kate made was her idea, developed by the brilliant Maya Wilson—of The Alaska from Scratch Cookbook fame—for Bristol Bay Sockeye Salmon, a brand stewarded by Alaska fishermen. They commissioned Maya to come up with recipes that could be made simply with just a few ingredients found anywhere, even at a sparsely stocked rural grocery store or a gas station.
And so I tried it. And I loved it. The flavor has a tangy fish-n-chips vibe. The crunch satisfies. I tested several kinds of chips. Lay’s Salt & Vinegar mixed with a handful of Kettle dill pickle chips packs just the right punch, IMHO. Do not use fancy thick-cut chips. They don’t crush right. I also tested with my favorite Kewpie mayo, but that really didn’t stand up to classic Best Foods. Kate likes to stir a little Barnacle Foods Bullwhip Hot Sauce into the mayo. I always take her advice. Here’s my take the Kate/Maya recipe.
(This recipe originally appeared in Edible Alaska. Subscribe!)
Ingredients:
Potato-chip salmon
- 1 pound salmon fillet
- sea salt
- 2 tablespoons Best Foods mayonnaise
- A splash of hot sauce
- 2 cups potato chips (a mix of salt & vinegar with an optional handful of dill pickle or jalapeño chips)
- chives, chopped
- ½ lemon
Method:
Preheat the oven to 400° F. Cover a sheet pan with parchment. Very generously salt fish and arrange on the pan. Place chips in a plastic bag and crush them into pieces, roughly the diameter of a pea. Stir hot sauce into the mayo, and spread a thick coat of mayo mix onto the salmon. Press the potato chips onto the mayo to form a crust. Bake for 9 minutes. Remove from the oven when the top is just a touch browned but the center is still rare. Squeeze lemon over hot fish and sprinkle with chives. Serve immediately.
This recipe was published in Edible Alaska.