We receive questions about whether customers have the option to order center cuts only for our wild salmon fillets. We’ll address that here by noting that fish have tails. Some customers think they don’t like fillets cut from the tail. We’d like to invite you to re-think the fish salmon tail and offer a couple of reasons to do so here with cooking suggestions and a few recipe ideas to best utilize all sections of the fish.
First of all, Alaskans and fishermen think this question of tail fillets is ludicrous. We like the tails because they have more tender meat. Alaskan kids grow up on tail fillets. While we here at Alaska Gold de-bone our salmon portions for our customers, in general Alaskans and fishermen work with the whole fish. So, a tail fillet is better for a young kid who might not know how to eat around the pin bones. You won’t find pin bones in the tail fillets.
Another benefit of tail portions is that they require less cooking time. Because, in general, they are thinner, cook the tail salmon fillets for less time. We believe that the obstacle customers run into when they say they don’t like the tail fillets is that they grab a tail portion and a center cut or a shoulder cut to cook along with the tail fillet at the same time. Well, that’s not going to work!
We always recommend when cooking our salmon fillets to eyeball and pick fillets of roughly the same thickness. That’s because if you’re cooking a thick center cut fillet and a thin tail fillet at the same time, either that thick center cut will be a little undercooked. Or, the tail fillet will be overcooked, which leads to both drying out of the fish. It also creates that off taste that people who don’t like eating seafood often mention. When cooking, aim for medium rare for all of your wild salmon portions. Cook your tail fillets together with other tail fillets and cook them for a few minutes less than you would a thicker center cut.
Take, for example, our coho salmon portions. Each 5-pound box is packed to be 5.0 pounds net weight. We aim for portion size to be 6 ounces, but in reality they vary between 5 and 7 or so. Take note that these are wild salmon and they are not exactly cookie cutter sized. So, in a 5-pound box, you might receive around 12-15 portions. Cuts will come from the center, tail and up towards the gills—a shoulder cut. We do our best to equally distribute portion sizes and cuts so that you get a relative proportion of center cuts to shoulder cuts and tail cuts. Coho salmon range from roughly 5 pounds to 12 pounds, but most ocean-caught coho salmon closer to 5-7 pounds. So, there is going to be variation in the size and thickness of portions and how many center cuts versus tail and shoulder cuts they will yield, depending on the size of the fish.
We also suggest a few recipes for best using tail fillets. First, this pan-seared za’atar coho salmon tails with chimichurri and pickled red onion recipe. Soups are also an option like this Coho Salmon Tom Kha Pla recipe. For our sablefish, tail portions were in our mind when we developed this Black Codbayaki recipe. All summer, I make this lemony miso spaghetti with Black Cod Tails recipe. It is divine and it won’t make a difference which part of the fish you use, but the recipe is specifically developed for black cod tails. We have a number of other recipes specifically designed for using salmon tail fillets here.
* This picture comes to us from Harrison Weinfeld aka The Sardinfluencer.
