Fish baked in salt

[raym]

Just cooked a red mullet for dinner. Baked in salt (cleaned and scaled, belly cavity stuffed with lemon slices and fresh herbs, then packed into a roasting dish with coarse sea salt 2cm deep all around and cooked in a hot oven for about 12 minutes). This is a fantastic way to cook fish, retaining the moisture so that the flesh is firm and succulent.

My question is: how do you get rid of all the salt? The fish is very delicate to handle once it's cooked and no matter how hard I try to extract it from its salt casing, I find myself crunching on crystals of salt when eating the cooked fish. Am I missing a trick?

Second question: this method requires more the 1/2 kilo of salt for a single fish; could the salt be set aside and reused?

[PicnicChef]

One of my friends, a chef from Lebanon, did that with a bluefish. However, once it was crusted, and cooked, he scraped off the majority of the salt before he peeled back the skin.

[tino27]

From all of the original Japanese Iron Chef episodes I saw over the years, adding some egg white to the salt mixture will cause the salt to sort of "harden". When the fish comes out of the oven, you crack the crust with the back of a knife and then remove large chunks of it at a time. Maybe this would help. Then again, with the addition of egg white, you probably couldn't re-use it.

[Baggy]

Not sure how you are preparing the salt. Do you mix if with just a touch of water so that you get a slush? Like tino27’s suggestion, when it goes in the oven the salt bakes hard like concrete and breaks off in slabs with very few salt bits remaining – and these are pretty easy to brush off.

Overall, the dish only works well with large salt crystals.

[Domestic Goddess]

To answer if the salt was reusable, yes it is if there was no addition of egg whites. The salt can be reused to bake another fish.

[Peter Green]

I pre-bake the salt, and then just bury the fish.

When it's done, I just use a brush to whisk the salt off of the skin if there's residue. In general, it slabs off.

A little off topic, but chicken (and duck) works well this way, too. There the skin tends to peel away with the salt, so the meat is ready to go (but you lose that lovely skin).

In an act of exuberance (getting way off topic) I tried a turkey like this. We had to mine the bird out with a hammer and chisel. The result was...interesting. I had actually recreated hospital cafeteria style turkey, the kind that rests in a puddle of bisto for days, and which you can pull across your face like a stretch mask.

I'll stick to fish.

[jayt90]

Sea salt is way more expensive than pickling salt; that would be my first choice, especially if I discarded it.

[rmillman]

I do not de-scale my fish when doing salt crust: the scales help form an additional barrier to salt penetration.

Straight salt works but does not really crust hard. I mix with water, a little flour and egg whites to form more of a paste. This crusts up hard and comes off more as a shell. Some people actually use more than just a little flour and form a type of salt dough that can be rolled out.

I use the least expensive salt and it does take 1-2lbs for most fish (but at 75-95 cent a pound it is worth it).

many variations can be found here:

http://www.saltinstitute.org/recipes.html