My sister Valerie and her hubby Walker got a Himalayan pink salt block for Christmas, so naturally we wanted to try it out at Christmas. A quick Internet search told us that you can either chill it in the fridge and serve cheese and hors d’oeuvres on it, or you can heat it like a sauna rock and cook pretty much anything on it after taking it out of the oven. You can also heat it on the stovetop.
So we went to Coastal Seafoods here in Minneapolis and bought a beautiful piece of fish.
The salmon turned out ABSOLUTELY PERFECT, and all we did was plunk it onto the salt block after heating the block alone in the oven for one hour. No extra seasoning required!
Our only regret is that we didn’t heat it at 500 degrees (the end desired temperature) for longer – it wasn’t quite as hot as it should be (we followed some instructions we had found to heat it gradually which seemed like a good idea), but the fish may have cooked faster if the block had been hotter.
The fish took twenty minutes to cook – five minutes on the skin side, then fifteen whole minutes on the other. I was wringing my hands, convinced it was a failure, but then when it cooked almost through, we served to perfection with farro salad and bok choy.
It stayed so moist that it tasted almost like lobster melting in your mouth. We’re imagining that the moistness is due to the fact that there is no ambient heat (as in an oven) to dry it out. Also, we had been concerned about juices flowing off the sides of the salt block and making a big mess, but there was no juice flowing out at all. It all stayed in the fish.
An excellent foodie experience for a pescatarian Christmas eve dinner!
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