Lemon Fennel Grilled Salmon

with creamy cucumber fennel sauce and foil-packet fennel garlic potatoes & zucchini

Grilled salmon scented with lemon and fennel, served with a creamy fennel cucumber sauce with a side of foil packet potatoes and zucchini. Surprisingly, it’s not the seeds or the bulb, but fennel fronds that are the magic ingredient in this recipe: cute frilly green leafy things that you find on top of the fennel plant. They look like fresh dill, and they have a texture that’s light and feathery and a flavor that’s out of this world. Perhaps because it looks so much like dill, my mind thought it would taste like dill, but it’s a more intense and green flavor, definitely with an anise hint, but nothing like licorice, in my humble opinion.

The pretty greens on top of the plant are often chopped off and tossed, but they are delicious in their own right and definitely deserve a place at the table. It was, naturally, my foodie sister that taught me this. We had gone mushroom hunting with my dad (the annual birthday trip) and when we stopped at her place to drop her off, she took me out to her garden to gather some cucumbers. She stepped over another row and asked if I’d like some fennel. She said the bulbs didn’t grow very big this year, but the green leafy tops are delicious.

Sure, I responded, I’ll try it. And so I came home with this grand bunch of beautiful fennel greens. The scent of them was intoxicating! I immediately started googling recipes to use them, but I really didn’t find many. It seems there is a sad lack of appreciation across the culinary web for this beautiful “herb”. Bon Appetit did an article, though, professing the goodness of fennel fronds and suggesting many uses for the greens of the fennel:  pestos, salsas, stocks, curries, vinaigrettes for an added hit of freshness. You can use fennel fronds to top yogurt dips, eggs, stir-fries, toasts, and seared meats, or toss your fronds into green salads or strew them on top of roasted vegetables.

I decided I’d start with fennel frond pesto, since there was SO much of it (from just one bulb!), and then I thought a salad dressing, something nice and creamy would be perfect with this lovely green. That’s how the cucumber fennel sauce came to be, and it DOES make a fabulous salad dressing, so save it for salads once you’re done slathering the salmon.

After tasting the fennel pesto and the dressing, I knew this flavor would be perfect on my favorite fish: salmon. So I grabbed some wild-caught Wild Alaskan salmon out of my freezer, thawed it out, then fired up my grill.

To get the good fennel flavor into the salmon, I simply took a good size sprig of fennel greens and set it right on top of the fillet. This is super easy and definitely infuses the salmon beautifully with the taste of fennel. In just a few minutes of cooking time, the salmon absorbs flavor on the bottom from the lemon slices and on the top from the fennel. The lemon does double duty by protecting the delicate fish from the direct heat of the grill, allowing the fish to cook through without burning on the bottom. Together with the smoky scent of the grill and the creamy sauce, it makes for an amazing meal worthy of company or date night. The potatoes and zucchini really are the perfect side to compliment it all. Pre-cooking the potatoes made them nice and tender while the zucchini took on a nice crisp-tender texture.

Unlike the picture above, you will want to pull the tangle of fennel off the top, though, before digging in because they tend to get wrapped around your fork and too much fennel in one bite is a bit much. Add some fresh snipped fronds if you like. If your fennel bulb looks anything like mine, you’ll have plenty of fronds to play with!

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