Baked Salmon with Garlic Butter

Salmon is a sta­ple of my diet at school, as much for its con­ve­nience as for its wide­ly tout­ed health ben­e­fits. Baked salmon in par­tic­u­lar is the poster child of con­ve­nience — it only real­ly needs a mod­est amount of sea­son­ing (though I must admit that I, per­son­al­ly, like a lit­tle more), and then you can stick it in the oven and leave it alone with min­i­mal super­vi­sion, and know that you will have a nice hot meal min­utes later.

These are real­ly the only ingre­di­ents you need — olive oil, salt, black pep­per, gar­lic, and but­ter, plus the salmon, of course. For a fun twist, I like to use truf­fle but­ter (pic­tured above, in the small black tub) instead of reg­u­lar but­ter. It seems to func­tion in large­ly the same way, so it should­n’t alter the recipe in any sub­stan­tive way, oth­er than to add some nice truffle‑y flavor.

The olive oil and but­ter func­tion large­ly to seal in the salmon’s mois­ture and to pre­vent it from dry­ing out while in the oven. I some­times cov­er the salmon with alu­minum foil as well to dimin­ish the chances of over­cook­ing it. (The dark flecks in the melt­ed but­ter, pic­tured above, come from the truf­fle aspect of the afore­men­tioned truf­fle butter.)

Although salt and pep­per (plus the olive oil and but­ter) are enough to give the salmon some nice fla­vor, I per­son­al­ly enjoy adding extra sea­son­ings. Some of my favorites are truf­fle zest, the Trad­er Joe’s Mul­ti­pur­pose Uma­mi Sea­son­ing Blend, and  Trad­er Joe’s 21 Sea­son­ing Salute.

And that’s basi­cal­ly it — you can go ahead and stick it in the oven! The rule of thumb that I’ve heard and use is that you should cook the salmon about 5 min­utes for every half inch of thick­ness, so be sure to mea­sure your salmon before baking.