Crispy Salmon and Caramelized Ginger-Onion Jam Dinner Plan
Along with Soy-Glazed Vegetables, it’s easy sailing for weeknight meals ahead
Cooking daily can get tiresome, so we all need easygoing ideas to jazz things up. One of mine is a salty, spicy, slight sweet caramelized ginger onion jam that my family has long enjoyed with fried catfish. It’s a dish we called cá trê chiên hành gừng.
Because good catfish is hard to come by these days (here in Santa Cruz, we typically get catfish for a few weeks in the spring and then it promptly disappears!), I pan-fry salmon and other fish to a delicate crisp and serve it atop or with a small bowl of the jam.
The result is what I’m writing about today — Cá Chiên Hành Gừng -- fried fish with onion and ginger. That plain name doesn’t do justice to the delicious dish that tastes more complex than it is to make.
The anchoring flavors are sourced from the gingery onion jam, which is brown and not much of a looker. However, it packs a wallop of scintillating flavor.
With about 5 pantry ingredients (6 if you count the water) and about 20 minutes, you can prep a small jar-full of the jam to keep for days to use for easy meals. I do a quick fish fry to serve with the jam, but grilled fish will take to it too. I bet the gingery oniony mixture would be great smeared onto bread for a fried fish sandwich.
Is this really a jam? Well, not if you think of jam for eating on a scone but this would taste good on a biscuit, I imagine. This is a savory jam, technically a relish, I suppose, but its texture is more like a loose jam than a pickle relish. Rory looked at it the other night and said, “This is a jam”.
To encourage you to try this relatively unknown Viet flavor combo and to offer some cool tips and tricks for your culinary back pocket, I crafted an easy dinner that you can make on a weeknight. Here’s roughly how it comes together:
This crispy salmon dinner plan will enable you to:
Spend less time at the stove (some of you are suffering through summertime heat domes)
Use one skillet (less dishwashing!)
Practice no-waste cooking to de-skin salmon fillet and turn the skin into crunchy, low-cal cracklings (yep, use the cracklings recipe for a future salmon skin salad!)
Learn salmon butchering basics to remove the skin and cut gorgeous, easy to cook pieces (I made a video for you!) Make a Caramelized Ginger-Onion Jam up to 3 days ahead
Use the jam to whip up an impressive, quick-and-easy dinner of Crispy Salmon, Caramelized Ginger-Onion Jam, and Soy-Glazed Veggies
Get ready for 3 short recipes strung together, in full text and as a downloadble PDF.
Vegans and vegetarians — the soy-glazed veggies are a great addition to your repertoire. Yes, radishes are fabulous sauteed.
All the details are below. If you don’t like salmon, I suggest other kinds of fish and welcome your ideas too! The crispy frying technique takes just over 1 minute and is applicable to many types of fish.