Butter-basted Salmon with Creamed Spinach

Keto cooking and seafood get along very well, because most of the work is already done: fish has no carbohydrate in it at all. The job is just to add fat without adding anything else, and butter-basting is the nicest way there is to do that.

Three grams of carbohydrate a serve, forty-three grams of protein, and skin that actually crackles. It is rich — about 700 calories — and that is deliberate, not an accident.

What you need

• 2 salmon fillets, about 180 g each, skin on and scaled
• 30 g butter
• 2 garlic cloves, lightly crushed
• 2 sprigs thyme
• 200 g baby spinach
• 100 ml thickened cream
• 20 g parmesan, finely grated
• A squeeze of lemon, salt, pepper, a grating of nutmeg

Skin on, scaled, pin-boned — ask for all three at the counter. Crisp salmon skin is most of the pleasure of this dish and you cannot get it from a skinless fillet.

How to cook it

1. Dry the skin like you mean it. Paper towel, then leave the fillets uncovered on a plate in the fridge for twenty minutes if you have the time. Dry skin crisps; damp skin steams.
2. Cold pan, skin down, then heat. Starting cold renders the fat under the skin gently instead of seizing it. Medium heat, and press each fillet flat for the first ten seconds so it doesn't curl.
3. Six to seven minutes on the skin. Do not move them. You'll see the colour change creep up the side of the fillet — when it's about two-thirds of the way up, you're close.
4. Butter, garlic, thyme. In around the fish. Tilt the pan and spoon the foaming butter over the flesh for a minute. Turn, thirty seconds, out onto a warm plate skin side up.
5. Spinach in the same pan. It will collapse in under a minute in the leftover butter. Cream in, parmesan in, nutmeg, pepper. Two minutes until it thickens.
6. Plate it. Spinach down, salmon on top, lemon over the fish only — lemon in the cream will split it.

Making it work for you

Lighter, still low-carb: drop the cream and parmesan, wilt the spinach in the pan juices, and finish with lemon. That takes it to about 490 calories with the carbohydrate unchanged.

Feeding four: doubles fine but use two pans. Crowding one pan means the skin steams and you lose the whole point.

Omega-3: salmon is the richest source on our counter — roughly 3.2 g of DHA and EPA in a 180 g serve. King Ora from New Zealand is a fattier fish again if you want a richer plate.