Brown butter, pomegranate, almond and dill roast salmon

Brown butter, pomegranate, almond & dill roast salmon – easy yet impressive. Jump to recipe.

It’s December! How, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve been MIA here since those cardamom buns in October, having dived both into the life-consuming hours of a surgical rotation and the joy of the re-emergence of a social life outside of a facetime screen. It was strange, that release into relative freedom – like we’d almost developed a form of Stockholm syndrome to staying within the cocooning safety of our own homes. What was a Friday night if not movies and pizza in bed? Yes, I did adjust to 9+ hours of sleep, time to procrastinate on the couch and move jigsaw pieces on the table, to attempt croissants and baby a sourdough starter and simultaneously watch the news in horror/fascination. When you do something long enough, it becomes habit  – isn’t that what they say? Time stretched out slow, but looking back the year has blurred into a haze of lockdown – nothing to distinguish one weekend and its failed zoom party from the next. Honestly, I owe my survival through the quietness to being able to see other humans at work everyday – I can’t imagine the isolation of living alone and working from home that many people have experienced. 

This week’s brown butter, pomegranate, almond and dill roast salmon is ideal for your new forays into dinner parties – easy yet impressive, the sort of recipe you can pull off in the chaotic half hour between walking in from the shops and when people arrive and still have time to change clothes, or the centre piece of a Christmas spread when you don’t want to be that host who sweats in the kitchen all afternoon. Being outside gin and tonic in hand is much more fun than roasting a turkey, promise.  

It’s also the first of a series of recipes I’m developing in collaboration with Prahran Market – a Melbourne food and produce market local to me that specialises in high quality, sustainable and ethically sourced specialty ingredients. It’s the sort of market I’ll happily wander through most weekends, flat white from Market Lane in hand, picking up everything from sourdough and kouign amann from Q le Baker, to fresh herbs, cheeses, za’atar and pomegranate molasses from the many delis and produce traders, or a new pastry brush, cookbook or cake tin from Essential Ingredient. The cheese toasties from Maker & Monger are also surely the best in Melbourne .

This salmon is much easier than it looks, and you can use either one large fillet like I have to serve a crowd, or a number of smaller pieces to suit. The 30 minutes brining step is optional, but it reduces the amount of white fat that rises to the surface during roasting. It’s topped with nutty and fragrant brown butter with toasted crisp almonds and almost caramelised red onion, salty capers and a tangy, sweet edge thanks to the pomegranate molasses. It takes just 10-15 minutes in the oven, depending on the size of your fillet and desired doneness (I’d always ere on the side of less, especially when it is good quality fish), and finished with handfuls of fresh herbs and pomegranate seeds to serve. Would recommend pairing it with Ottolenghi’s easy smashed pea new potatoes and grilled spring asparagus or broccolini on the side.