After a long winter it is finally warm enough to fire up the grill, it's a bit windy but I made it work. One of the things you learn living out here is that you have to work with the weather.
Waiting for everything to be perfect just doesn't fly out here. When people come to visit and ask me “what do you think the weather is going to do?” I usually respond with, “Whatever it ends up doing!”. I answer that way not out of ignorance but from experience, the weather out here is temperamental and you just learn to roll with whatever its doing.
My wife on her last trip out of town brought back some nice steaks and it seemed like the perfect time to get them cooked up. As I was thinking about how I wanted to cook them I decided to try something I had read about and have been wanting to try but just haven't gotten to it. Cooking a whole salmon on the grill! Now I've been cooking salmon all my life, fried, boiled, pickled, salted, smoked, roasted over a fire, wrapped in aluminum foil and buried in the coals of a fire! But I haven't put one whole on a grill, that changes today! I pulled one out of the freezer, a small Chinook or King Salmon we caught last year in our subsistence gilnet. Usually we filet them but this one I had only headed and gutted. A couple days ago I had put it in the refrigerator to thaw out.
I pulled it out, cut open the vacuum bag and rinsed it off. Once it was clean I wiped it off and set it on the counter to dry a bit as the grill warmed up. I then cut diagonal slits along the outside of it, flipped it over and did the same to the other side. I then seasoned the inside with salt, pepper, and dried dill. I used the same seasoning on the outside making sure I got plenty of it in the cuts I had made. I've heard of people cutting up lemon and putting it inside the fish and in the cuts on the sides. I didn't have lemon but what I did have was some bacon grease we had saved from the last time we made bacon. So I put a few dollops (what a strange word) inside the fish and pressed some into the cuts on the outside.
By now the grill was plenty hot and I had already put the steaks on it, so I made room and plopped that salmon right on the grill! It looked great! After awhile the fire began to crackle as the bacon grease and the fat from the fish dripped into it. King salmon is a very fatty fish which is why it is so delicious! I let that thing cook away checking it every now and then to see if it was ready to be turned over. I had heard that when cooking fish in a grill you really need to not mess with it don't try to turn it over before its ready. That skin will stick to the grill but if you leave it long enough as it chars it will release from the grill. I have to be honest, I was impatient, being my first time I didn't want to mess it up. After 10 minutes I tried to turn it and it was still stuck, so I left it another 5 minutes. Trying again it lifted off the grill with ease and I was able to flip it. I let it cook on the other side another 15 minutes and it was perfect!
I pulled it off the grill and brought it right in to my waiting family! That thing cooked beautifully, charred and crispy on the outside moist and flakey on the inside. Plating it up it slid easily from the bones. That first bite was phenomenal! The grill and bacon grease had done the job, it was smokey with a hint of bacon that really complemented the flavor of the salmon itself which was the star of the show as it should be. I can't take too much credit, when you have something as amazing as Wild Alaskan King Salmon to work with no matter what you do it's going to turn out great!
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