Honey Dijon Pretzel-Crusted Salmon

Date Completed: 6/7/2021

Another Seafood chapter brings another salmon recipe. This one, though, I’m very excited about because it comes from Everyday Dinners by Jessica Merchant. Jessica writes the blog How Sweet Eats. I read that blog all the way back in high school and made tons of her recipes! I now own two of her cookbooks, and still read her posts on a regular basis. She’s awesome!

Everyday Dinners just recently came out, and I’m a big fan of the premise: simple dinner recipes with suggestions for what she calls “10-minute meal prep” - love it!

Seafood chapters are tough for me because I can’t say that I love fish. I’m a recent convert to salmon, though, so that saves me in these chapters. I also love the idea of anything pretzel-crusted so this recipe was the obvious choice.

After laying out my salmon filets on a sheet pan and seasoning them with salt and pepper, I got to work on the toppings. I ground up pretzels in my food processor and mixed together the honey-dijon base.

I topped each piece of salmon with a generous amount of the honey-dijon and then layered on the crushed pretzels.

I threw them into the oven for about 12 minutes. While they cooked, I whipped up some garlicky almond green beans as a side. That was it! Dinner is served.

Taste Report:

I had enough extra honey-dijon sauce to drizzle on top of the baked salmon. That was a big win because the sauce had delicious flavor! I enjoyed every bite of this salmon.

The only disappointment was the texture of the pretzel topping. I assumed it would be crunchy, but the pretzels ended up fairly soft. Kind of like a stale pretzel taste? The honey-dijon sauce really made up for that though!

Mess Report:

If the minimal time this recipe took to prepare wasn’t enough of a benefit, this tiny mess really sold me on the recipe! There was such minimal cleanup time. That made me love it even more! I think this would be very doable for a weeknight dinner.

I was very proud of my food styling for these photos. Don’t those whole pretzels give it such a cute touch? They should because I absolutely stole the idea from the photo in the book!

Maybe someday I’ll cook a seafood recipe involving something other than salmon?