Salmon can be cooked as a nutritious and mouth-watering choice for either lunch or dinner, and can be remarkably enhanced with the right touch. Chef Marc Matsumoto from No Recipes swears by one “magic” ingredient when cooking salmon, whether you’re grilling, roasting or pan-searing it - and that’s dried shitake mushrooms.

He shared a post in which he tried to recreate a seasoning that used a blend of celery, garlic, onion, and other flavour-enhancers that his mom had used on salmon. After considering a dash of MSG, he wrote: “I started thinking of other ingredients that are filled with umami-enhancing glutamates. I remembered a few recent successes using shiitake powder in chicken sausage as well as a ragu, and wondered what it would taste like encrusted on the salmon.

To add flavour to your salmon with a shiitake mushroom, the chef recommends finely grating a dried shiitake over the salmon, and it should resemble Parmesan.

Food experts at Food52 tried out this cooking tip on half a fillet of salmon and left the other side plain to see how it would compare. They said: “The difference was profound.

“The no-shiitake half tasted perfectly fine, but the shiitake half tasted better like it had been made by a very intuitive and talented cook. This is the half we all deserve in our lives.”

Ingredients 

One large salmon fillet

One teaspoon of extra-virgin olive oil

Two pinches of sea salt

Fresh ground pepper, to taste

One to two large shiitake mushrooms

Method

Preheat the oven to 140C/120C Fan/ Gas Mark 1. Place the salmon fillet on a sheet pan and rub the salmon all over with the oil. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper.

Next, finely grate the dried shiitake generously onto both sides of the salmon—it should look like a thick, fluffy blanket all over the fish. Arrange the fillet on the pan skin side down. If cooking more than one, space them out an inch or two between.

Roast until a fork inserted in the thickest part of the salmon meets no resistance, the flesh separates easily from the skin, and is just beginning to flake when you poke into it, 10 to 35 minutes.

Don’t worry if the top of the fish has a slightly transparent look; this is the result of the low roasting temperature. Remove the fish from the oven.

Then switch the oven to grill on high. With a spatula, slide the salmon off the skin and transfer the salmon to a plate.

Place the pan with the skin on a rack about five inches under the heating element and grill until the skin blisters and turns golden brown in spots. This should take one to two minutes. Watch carefully as it can burn quickly.