Mary Berry is pretty happy to experiment with traditional recipes – we’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how she uses chicken for her midweek lasagne, and includes a surprisingly sweet ingredient in her spaghetti bolognese.
But there is one culinary rule the Cordon Bleu-trained chef seems determined not to break – whether she’s making turkey or roasting chicken, the former Great British Bake-Off judge will not suffer a dry hunk of meat.
So it’s no wonder her oven-baked salmon recipe, which is featured in her cookbook Mary Berry Foolproof Cooking, relies on far more than just its cream cheese and pepper topping to offer that hard-to-maintain juiciness.
How does Mary Berry Keep salmon moist in the oven?
You know how you’re not meant to crowd roast potatoes as you cook them, because they’ll steam instead of roasting if they’re too close together?
Well, Mary’s salmon technique takes advantage of that usually-inconvenient fact.
She advises we “place the salmon fillets fairly close to each other on the baking tray so that they keep each other moist and don’t dry out during cooking”.
The poaching proximity might change the cook time of your fish, but as Mary says: “You will know when they are cooked, as the flesh will become a matt pink colour all the way through.”
Mary also squeezes fresh lemon over it as soon as it leaves the oven.
Food publication Delicious Magazine offers another solution; you can create a “parcel” for your salmon out of baking paper or tinfoil, which offers similar steaming results.
However you won’t get the crispy skin so many salmon lovers crave, which for me defeats the point of paying for the pricey fish in the first place.
Why does salmon get so dry in the oven to begin with?
It feels wrong to have to jump through so many hoops to achieve a juicy, moist fillet in the oven – but seeing as the fish is low in fat, it’s not got the in-built baster something like a skin-on chicken thigh offers.
Some issues that can dry your dinner out further include having your oven at too high a temperature, skipping a drizzle of olive oil or a part of butter (for that much-needed fat), or simply letting it cook for too long.
Salmon experts at the Wild Alaskan company recommend keeping your salmon’s skin on, remembering that your fish keeps cooking for a while when you remove it from the oven, and using a meat thermometer.
The fish is done when it reads 45-50°C, the BBC says.