My adventure with this big fish peaked as I tried shoving it — lovingly stuffed and carefully sewn up with pink thread — into my twenty-inch apartment-sized oven. There was swearing and a little dance of frustration. Maybe even a lump in the throat. Then I hacked it in half and moved on.
It turns out the easiest part of making a whole fish is prepping and roasting it. The tricky part is finding a fish that doesn't come with a complicated load of environmental and health baggage, and salmon is no exception.
Wild Alaskan salmon is as politically correct as you can get since the farmed stuff ranks very low on the list of sustainable seafood. Red snapper is commonly cooked whole, but also ranks low unless you're catching it yourself in certain parts of Hawaii. Trout, bass and small fish like sardines are good choices. To stay on top of the latest in seafood sustainability, use one of the online guides from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Blue Ocean Institute, or the Natural Resources Defense Council and make an informed choice and know that these lists are constantly shifting.
Salmon is hard to find whole in a regular market; wild Alaskan salmon is even more difficult. But if you make friends with your fishmonger, you can usually arrange something. The smaller guys like trout, bass and sardines are easier to find. Sardines are really a miracle fish: good for you, easy on the seas, and they cook before you have time to blink.
If you find yourself blessed with a whole fish, follow a few simple steps and you'll have an impressive presentation. (Kissing the fish on the mouth, or anywhere for that matter, is optional.)
How to Cook a Whole Fish
Each pound of whole fish roughly yields one and a half servings
- Start with a cleaned, possibly de-boned fish. Some fish are better cooked with their bones in. Ask your fishmonger.
- Preheat the oven to between 350°F and 450°F. The bigger the fish, the higher the temperature.
- Rub the fish, inside and out, with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
- Stuff the fish, if desired. (Small fish like sardines are better served with a external sprinkling of, say, chopped garlic and parsley rather than a stuffing.) A variety of things work: very thin citrus slices, fennel, whole herb sprigs, sliced olives, sliced garlic, caramelized onions, sliced tomatoes, etc.
- If the fish is large and does not lay flat as if it weren't stuffed, sew up the cavity using a trussing needle and twine, or with toothpicks spaced about an inch apart.
- If the fish is too big for your oven, slice it in half crosswise right up to the stitches, leaving them intact.
- Place the fish on a roasting pan lined with parchment paper or olive-oil rubbed sliced vegetables (fennel and onions work best) and rub the outside with a little more olive oil. Give it another sprinkling of salt and pepper.
- Cooking time can be anywhere from one hour for a large fish like my eight-pounder, to just 10 minutes for small fish like a sardines. A typical 1-2 pound single serving fish like trout or branzino might take 20-30 minutes at 400°F. Midway through, pour a bit of white wine into the pan. To test for doneness, use an instant-read thermometer on large fleshly fish like my salmon (aim for 130°F) and for smaller fish like trout, simply cook until the flesh flakes easily when poked with a fork.
- To serve larger fish, slice crosswise into portions (we took ours on a picnic in parchment paper, below) or carefully peel back the skin and lift out pieces from each side with a spatula. To serve smaller fish, bring to the table whole, providing a fork and knife. Watch for bones.
It's Reader Request Week at The Kitchn! This post was requested by Janet Brandt.
(Originally published 2010-05-13)
(Images: Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan)
How to Make Easy 3-Ingredient Energy Bars at Home
How to Make Fresh Pasta Dough in the Food Processor
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
TW Salt Mill by Wil...
Small Cool Lessons: Discovering Small Space Design Ideas That Really Work
Marisa and Peter's Playfully Eclectic Home
well done. fast decisive response. you also can set the fish up on its tummy and curl it it around if you want to keep it whole. keep the bones in kids, it's more flavor and it's fun to lift the bones off in one or two pieces after it's cooked.
That picture of your(?) little one giving the fish head a smooch is priceless! What an adventurous tot.
Regardless of the size of the fish, I prefer to cook them outside 0n a decent charcoal grill using the indirect method. You can roast a whole fish and get flavors that are more intense.
What a cutie pie! (The kid, not the fish.)
As the first commenter said, curling them up works. In Malaysia they would fit big fish in a round steamer by lassoing the tail with string and tying the string off to the head/gills. Don't cinch him up too tightly or he'll crack in half during cooking. They make a good presentation curled up like that - I find it more attractive than laid out like a 'dead fish.'
Oh, Sara Kate, you brought back 20 years' worth of memories of cooking in a 20-inch oven and on a 20-inch stove! Love the suggestions to curl the fish ... and love the photo of Ursula kissing that toothy jaw!
I feel really lucky to live in the NW where nearly every store sells whole Alaskan Salmon. I've pickled sardines, but never cooked them. I will give that a try.
Phoxx - the Malaysian style presentation sounds lovely. When I've had whole fish larger than my pans I have cooked them on a cooling rack set in a large sheetpan and add a foil tent if I want to steam it. It works great as long as your oven is large enough!
Clearly, you need a larger stove.
Any information on how cleaning a fish for this process differs from filleting a fish? (Aside from the obvious gutting and skinning.) I do a lot of fishing in the summer.
There's nothing like a whole fish. The problem for many people is figuring out doneness without making the fish look like it's been in a fight. James Beard wrote about the Canadian Fisheries Department's 10-minutes-an-inch technique many years ago. While it's not perfectly foolproof (what is, after all?), it has never let me down (plus or minus a minute or so). You measure the fish (stuffed or otherwise) from its fattest point when on its side. Then cook for 10 minutes per inch (so, 1 1/2 inches would require 15 minutes of cooking, and so on). The method works for fish in any guise (i.e., steaks, fillets, whole, etc.) and with any cooking method (roasting, grilling, poaching, etc.). Again, it may not be absolutely perfect, but it does reduce doneness anxiety substantially.
What's wrong with wild salmon caught in BC? Its readily available on the west coast and, to my knowledge, equally as sustainable as those caught in Alaska.
When the French "curl" a fish back on itself, so it looks as if it is biting its own tail (usually a trout, usually in Alsace or inspired by Alsatian trout), they call it "mad" as in crazy. Like the poster above said, you have to put it on its belly to make it work, so the pink thread stitching would be indespensible, Sarah.
I prefer to cook a whole salmon en papillote - a layer of foil, a layer of greaseproof (the greaseproof is there to stop any interaction between lemon juices etc from affecting the taste of the fish), the fish, and any stuffing within, then wrap it up using the foil to seal in the goodies. Cook in a very hot oven till all of a sudden you smell fish and remember it's in there. It'll be perfectly cooked at that point (about half hour for a salmon filleted). No sewing/thread skills required, and all the juices stay contained, and the fish can't dry out.
"Then I hacked it in half and moved on."
Hooray! I love this transitional sentence. It may become a catchphrase in my life. Fish or other frustrating situations that need some humor. You don't need a larger oven. Just creativity and a good hacking knife. Or the french curl suggestions.
Thanks for the great instructions. I live in the Pacific Northwest, right on the Puget Sound, so have access to whole salmon whenever they are in season, which is now. I cannot wait to cook a whole one as I have been afraid to do so in the past. The comments people have left are a great help as well. Thanks to all who have posted, I will take your hints to heart!
Ahhh, the great 20 in. oven, have the exact same one. Oh, and I recently just bought TWO baking sheets that are exactly 1/4 of an inch too large, so the oven door is eternally propped open. Thanks for the fantastic post...this is my next venture in cooking. I tackled raw chicken, now it's fish with the heads attached!
I have cooked a whole trout using a packed salt method. I cooked a second whole trout wrapping it in foil. Both worked very well, they were equally as moist. My son liked it when I was getting ready to serve them, I was able to remove the entire skeleton in one piece.
My favorite method of cooking whole fish is grilling them. We score the fish's belly a little so they cook evenly then rub some salt and pepper on them, the onto the grill the go. My mom also fries them some times, which is really nice too, though some fishes may be too big for this method.
I've had the good fortune of partaking in a homestyle Chinese meal complete with a whole fish in the center of the table. There was no fancy filleting going on...everyone just snatched pieces of the fish with their chopsticks and the hostess snatched the eye for herself. ;)
Your 20" oven will probably not be big enough, but I would highly recommend cooking a whole fish in a salt crust. Leave the scales on as this protects the flesh from becoming too salty. Once cooked, the skin becomes slightly leathery, and just peels off to reveal moist, meltingly tender flesh. Serve outdoors if possible - you will get salt everywhere when you break open the crust.