Never Deal With Stuck Fish Again Using Alex Guarnaschelli's Pan-Searing Tip

It's always a shame when you pan sear a salmon so well your pan decides to keep some for itself. Watching the bottom of salmon detach and stick to the pan is a common problem among home seafood chefs, and although it might eventually separate once it's cooked for long enough, you still want to avoid the fish getting stuck and breaking apart. Thankfully, the New York-based Food Network host Alex Guarnaschelli has some advice for this.

Guarnaschelli posted a video on Instagram showing the basic steps for pan searing a good salmon, but one tip in particular stands out for keeping the salmon from getting stuck. Guarnaschelli does two things before putting the salmon on the pan. First, she douses the pan in olive oil, as adding oil of any kind is a well-known way to prevent sticking. However, she doesn't place the salmon in straight away; she waits for the olive oil to begin smoking and says that now it's safe to drop the salmon on top without any chance of it getting stuck. You can shell out for a fancy nonstick pan, or even cook salmon in the microwave, but heating up olive oil prior to adding the fish is an easy way to avoid both of those options.

Why does pre-heating olive oil work? The proteins inside the raw fish are prone to bonding with the metal in a stainless steel pan. Once the fish is cooked for long enough, those proteins will be properly burned up and the fish will separate into a mess. By adding a layer of oil, you're creating a force field of sorts which separates the fish from the pan, ensuring they don't bond (while also flavoring the salmon).

While it may seem like an obvious tip to combine fish and olive oil, it's actually not the oil of choice for many folks. Plenty of recipes suggest using an oil with a higher smoke point (the temperature at which the oil begins to burn and produce smoke), like canola or sunflower oil. The smoke point of olive oil is remarkably low compared to other oils. Maybe Guarnaschelli prefers using olive oil for its flavor. Even still, although it's hard to tell an olive oil's quality by its color, she's clearly burning the oil when it smokes. She switches the heat to low as soon as the oil begins to smoke and the salmon is added right then, which would bring the temperature down, but it is an interesting choice. Dijon mustard is famously the condiment that Alex Guarnaschelli can't function without, but she proves that olive oil can get lots of use too, especially for a rich, savory meat like salmon.