Seared Salmon & Green Potato Salad with Pickled Mustard Seeds from Blue Apron Reviewed

This was a pretty fun recipe to make because it was pretty weird stuff (except for the salmon). The “green” potato salad contained horseradish, and those mustard seeds on top of the salmon were totally unexpected. Making the pickled mustard seed was an interesting experience, although I'll probably never do it again.

I guess my disappointment with this dish was that it was just plain old salmon, seasoned with salt and pepper and pan fried. I guess that's how recipes work though, and you can't have too much weird stuff all at once.

To knock out this recipe quicker, get your potatoes started first!

Cooking and pickling the mustard seed was definitely fun. You have to heat them up in the dry pan and swishing them around until they started to smell fragrant.

Here's the final product of the water, sugar, and vinegar. Beside that, I've got the spinach which was sautéed, then chopped up. The chopped spinach reminds me of the Nepalese chicken tarkari recipe.

Beautiful red salmon! But with such a bright red color, I wonder if it's natural that way, or if it was dyed.  I know that sometimes that's done because the public expects that a bright red color means “fresh”. It's true though, that wild caught salmon is much more red than farmed salmon!

The text was also quite different – much flakier, it fell apart more easily, and it was much dryer (despite not cooking it for the full time). I don't know if that's good or bad. Perhaps I just overcooked it, but that still doesn't account for the flaky texture when raw!

Prepping to make the green potato salad. I just dumped everything into a large mixing bowl – even the whole container of horseradish.

Now, I'm a big fan of horseradish, but I felt that the whole container included with the kit was too much, and made the potato salad taste too much like that wasabi-burn-your-nose flavor. If you are sensitive to these types of flavors, add just a bit at a time!

The final salmon was a little dry (my fault), but the potato salad was tasty for sure. I like the idea of chopping up greens and getting them into your starches! The pickled mustard seed topping for the salmon was interesting to look at, and had a fun texture, but didn't really add much of a flavor component. Here's the recipe from Blue Apron.