Ingredients
- 3 slices McGrath’s sourdough bread
- 1 TBSP pine nuts
- 1 small clove garlic, finely chopped
- 1 tsp salt, plus more
- 1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper, plus more
- 4 cups lightly packed fresh basil leaves
- 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
- 4 boneless, wild-caught salmon fillets (about 6 oz. each),
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
To make breadcrumbs, toast the bread and let it cool. Pulse the bread in a food processor to make breadcrumbs. Remove all of the bread crumbs and set them aside.
Put the pine nuts, garlic, salt, and pepper to the crumbs in the food processor and pulse. Add the basil and process again. With the motor running, add the olive oil in a slow stream, stopping occasionally to scrape down the sides of the bowl, until the pesto is spreadable.
Brush a small baking sheet with coconut oil or butter, put the fillets on it, and season them with salt and pepper. Spread a 1/4-inch layer of the pesto evenly over the top of each fillet. Sprinkle the reserved breadcrumbs over the pesto.
Bake until the salmon is cooked — it should just start to turn opaque, with a trace of bright orange in the middle — and the topping is lightly browned. It takes 8 to 15 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish.
Notes:
This is a great salmon recipe to use with your cilantro pesto (recipe here).
Wild for Salmon is where I get all my salmon. Its a PA family that has a boat in Alaska at Bristol Bay. They spend their summers there fishing. You can buy from their website and they ship in dry ice or you can order through a co-op. We have a co-op, they usually do deliveries twice a year at a house in Lemoyne. The buying club is Wertz’s Wild4Salmon Buying club.
Find high quality extra virgin olive oil here.
If you are in South Central PA, McGraths is a local bakehouse in Mechanicsburg that makes bread right! They use unhybridized local ancient grains, mill the grains themselves right before the make the bread and all their breads are real sour dough (no added yeast in anything!). They have several drop off locations, Cornerstone Coffee house is one of them, so is radish and rye at the Broadstreet Market, https://mcgrathsbakehouse.com
High quality salts, herbs, spices, seeds and nuts can be found here.
Nuts.com has very nice organic nuts but they also sell a lot of junk food I do not support. Therefore the only food I buy from them are their organic nuts and seeds.