Salmon’s pretty reliably enjoyable — it’s the second most popular seafood in America, second only to shrimp. It’s often tasty, and sometimes downright delicious. We’ve had plenty of great salmon in our time, from Tokyo sushi bars to a Barefoot Contessa weeknight dinner special. But rarely have we had salmon as fabulous as Klamath River Chinook (king) salmon, caught the night before in a river recently freed from four dams, before being cooked Yurok-style over an open fire.
As we mentioned in this episode of Gastropod, the chefs for this unforgettable meal were Sammy and Jon Luke Gensaw, brothers, fishermen, activists, and members of the Yurok tribe. The Yurok, whose ancestral home lies at the mouth of the Klamath River in California’s far north, have relied on salmon as the mainstay of their diet and their culture for millennia. For the Gensaw brothers and for the Yurok, any opportunity to cook salmon is a special one, but this dinner was particularly noteworthy: We met them for a salmon cookout just days after the final chunks of the dams that had blocked salmon from spawning in much of their ancestral habitat were blown up and trucked away.
It was September, and the salmon gathering at the mouth of the Klamath — among them, the one we were now about to eat — were finally going to be able to travel upstream. There, they would find hundreds of miles of pristine riffles and pools that they’d been cut off from for more than a century. The Klamath used to be the third-largest salmon river in the continental United States; since the dams were built, runs have diminished to the point that tribes were frequently not allowed to catch even a single fish required for their ceremonies, nor for subsistence. The Gensaw brothers were among the many tribal members who had led the two decade-long fight to bring salmon back to the Klamath.
To cook salmon the Turok way, Jon Luke dug a pit, roughly a foot deep and three to four feet long, and got a blazing fire going — in their case, made with fragrant alder wood, though madrone is also traditional. While the fire burned down, Sammy used a pocket knife to sharpen three-foot-long cooking sticks, originally carved by his father from broken pieces of a fallen redwood, in order to remove any splinters and hone their tips to fine points. After divvying up their salmon into individual filets, the Gensaws slid the pointy end of the sticks between the skin and the flesh on each piece of fish, fitting two or three filets a couple of inches apart on each stick, with about a foot of space at the bottom.
Once the fire reduced down to coals, creating a radiant heat, the brothers stuck each stick upright into the dirt, like a fence post around the fire. For the first 25 to 30 minutes, the fish pieces faced skin side in, until the skin was crispy. Then, the brothers rotated each stick so that the salmon cooked for another 10 to 15 minutes with the flesh side in.
We removed each piece by twisting it gently off the stick — if you just pull, you risk ripping all that amazing crispy skin — and tucked in. The result blew our minds. Listen to the “Bringing Salmon Home” episode of Gastropod to learn more about the Gensaw brothers and our new favorite way to prepare salmon.
