Baked Salmon with Miso and Sage Marinade

This delicious salmon marinade pairs miso and sage with garlic, ginger, and orange. This baked salmon recipe is super flavourful and couldn’t be easier to make!

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Salmon is my favourite protein. When I was a child, my mum manipulated me into loving salmon by saying that is was “candy for orca whales”. As the worlds biggest Free Willy fan, naturally this sparked a lifelong love for this flavourful fish. We eat salmon at least once a week, and I have SO MANY salmon recipes that I plan on sharing with you. This miso and sage marinade for baked salmon is actually the newest to my repertoire, but I am LOVING the combination of earthy flavours for these increasingly chilly fall days.

Derek and I are so fortunate to live on the west coast and own a boat with on we can spend weekends exploring the Gulf Islands and catching our dinners. I think Derek spent a record number of hours out on the boat this summer, and our freezer shows it! Typically, we start the day by setting traps for crab and prawns  (see my recipes for THE BEST spot prawn ceviche). Then, depending on the season we “jig” for lingcod, or troll for salmon. We also went fishing when we visited Tofino, and caught so many cod and halibut. So we are all set for a very delicious winter.

I really love catching and growing our own food. Derek hunts, and between the hunting and fishing we try not to buy any meat from the store. It’s a luxury we are very fortunate to have. We love the connection that it brings to what we eat, the same way carrots from your own garden always taste better! We also love that it is the most sustainable way to eat meat, not to mention two of Derek’s favourite hobbies. With some exiting travel plans on the horizon, eating vegetarian apart from meat/fish that we have caught is part of how we are trying to balance our upcoming flights.

Tips for Buying Salmon

Of course, our situation is unique, so here are some tips for buying salmon! First off, please don’t ever buy farmed salmon. The salmon farms are devastating the wild salmon populations here on the west coast, by spreading sea lice to wild hatchling salmon and leaching antibiotics into the oceans. Because farmed salmon are packed so close together, they have to be fed huge doses of antibiotics to prevent infection. A more eco friendly (and cost effective) option to farmed salmon is farmed steelhead trout. I honestly can’t tell the different between a steelhead trout and a chinook (spring) salmon, and the are raised in inland farms so they don’t affect wild populations.

Everybody gravitates towards sockeye salmon, and on the west coast, this is often the wild salmon sold in stores. However, there are lots of other types often sold at fish stores and they are all delicious! My favourite type of salmon is Coho!

This Baked Salmon Recipe

Miso paste is a great item to add to your shopping list. I buy Amano Organic Shiro Miso. It’s great because you can keep in in the freezer FOREVER (at least I do) and you don’t have to defrost it to use it. I use miso paste in tons of recipes like soups and on grilled portobello mushrooms. I have always made an orange, ginger, garlic, and miso baked salmon as it was one of my mum’s “orca candy” recipes.

Adding sage is what makes this a new recipe! I don’t know where I got the idea, but the sage and miso flavour combo really works! It adds an earthy, herby flavour to the otherwise asian tasting marinade. I grow sage on our patio, and always prefer fresh herbs to dried. I am not sure how well this recipe would work with dried sage, but if you try it, comment below!