Smoked salmon is a tender delicacy that is as versatile as it is tasty. You can use smoked salmon in dishes for any meal from breakfast to a late-night snack. Methods of preparing smoked salmon are as unlimited as your imagination, but certain methods are more effective for preserving smoked salmon's texture than others. Pan frying smoked salmon is an excellent way to heat it and bring out its natural salty sweetness without changing its melt-in-your-mouth softness.
Smoked Salmon Facts
Smoked salmon is raw salmon that has been brined in salt water and then smoked. It differs from lox, which is simply brined, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Though it is high in omega-3 fatty acids, which promote heart health, smoked salmon should be served as an occasional treat. One 3 oz. serving contains only 99 calories, but it also offers just fewer than 700 mg of sodium, which is a lot.
Pan Frying Facts
Pan frying is pretty much the same cooking technique as sautéing. Technically, sauté means "jump" and it refers to what the food does when the chef lifts the pan and moves it in a sudden controlled motion that flings the food an inch or so into the air and flips it over. When pan frying, you turn the food with a spatula or fork rather than tossing it around. Smoked salmon is both light and a bit sticky, so pan frying it is preferable to trying an authentic sauté.
Procedure
The best way to pan fry smoked salmon is to add it to a dish as flavoring at the very end of cooking time. Snip your smoked salmon into pieces about the size of your thumb's first section and scatter them on top of scrambled eggs with onions or cream sauce for pasta. Let the salmon absorb the heat from the food that is almost cooked rather than letting it come directly into contact with the frying pan. If you have to pan fry salmon by itself, put a little bit of olive oil or white wine in the bottom of the skillet to keep it from sticking or drying out.
Warnings
Smoked salmon is already somewhat dried out from the smoking process. Cooking it for too long at too high a temperature can dry it out even more. Salmon gets unpleasantly tough to chew when it is dried out, so don't walk away from a frying pan that has salmon in it. If the smoked salmon starts to turn very dark or curl up at the edges, it is starting to dry out.
