Olive Oil Poached Salmon with Peach Salsa

This meal was inspired by this post on Marks Daily Apple.

I was a little nervous at cooking fish in so much oil at a very low temperature, but it turned out perfectly – moist, flavourful and not at all greasy.

We paired this salmon with a peach salsa and stir-fried ruby chard.

The tomatoes in the salsa make this a stage 4 reintroduction recipe.  When reintroducing foods on the AIP, I recommend this guide.

Olive Oil Poached Salmon with Peach Salsa

serves 6

For the fish:

6 skinned salmon fillets (ours weighed around 4oz each)

sea salt

olive oil to cover

3 cloves of garlic – smashed

2-3 sprigs rosemary

2-3 sprigs thyme

a few black peppercorns (omit if strict AIP)

For the peach salsa:

3 fresh, ripe peaches – diced

3 lg tomatoes – seeded and diced

3-4 green onions – chopped

1 tbsp fresh lime juice

1 tbsp olive oil (you could use some of the olive oil that the fish was poached in!)

1 handful fresh cilantro leaves – roughly chopped

sea salt

Instructions

Place the fish in a pot and lightly season with sea salt.  Cover with olive oil.  This is the olive oil that we use:

It is Tunisian and has a wonderful fruity flavour.  We buy this from Basha Foods.

Add the smashed garlic cloves (you don’t want to crush them, just squish them a little so that they break up), the rosemary and thyme sprigs and the black peppercorns (if using).

Put the pot of oil over a medium-low heat until very tiny bubbles form around the edges of the fish.  You don’t want the oil to get too hot.  I monitored the temperature of the oil by dipping my (clean!) little finger in it….  My aim was to keep the oil at a temperature where I could bear to do this.  If the heat is getting a bit high, turn the heat down to low.

You are poaching the fish very, very gently in warm rather than hot oil.  And believe me, it DOES cook at this temperature!

I found that my fish took longer to cook than the 5-8 minutes stated in the original recipe – mine took slightly over 10 minutes.  I am not sure if this is because of altitude (food takes longer to cook at a high altitude) or if it was because my oil was not quite as hot.

Either way, my fish cooked in slightly over 10 minutes.

While the fish was cooking, I made the peach salsa

All you do is to mix all the ingredients together, adding a little bit of the fish cooking oil.  Chill until the fish is cooked.

Serve the fish with the salsa on top and stir-fried greens such as ruby chard.

And as I stated above, it was not greasy or oily, it was moist, flavourful and perfectly cooked!

I removed the fish from the oil and served it with a peach salsa and stir-fried ruby chard made using this recipe.

And I strained the oil and used it later in the week to make some homemade mayonnaise!  I also used a little bit of the oil in the peach salsa.