Salmon & Black Sesame

I had been wanting to cook a salmon dinner for quite a while. In fact, I'll admit that I had never cooked fish before and was yearning for a nice salmon steak with some vegetables, but was slightly afraid. I wanted the fish to be cooked but not burnt, tasty but not fish-tasty, basically delicious.

Armed with high hopes, I marched to the supermarket and bought two salmon steaks. The rest was waiting at home: fresh green beans from my uncle's garden, and crushed black sesame seeds from my trip to the Japanese grocery store a while ago.

After putting the green beans in the steam-cooker, I proceeded to think about a tasty sauce that would go well with salmon. As you may have guessed, I am absolutely not a fish guru and have actually only been eating it for the past three years or so. I won't get into how I developed a hatred for fish (it involves a particularly traumatizing experience when I was six years old), but anyway, I couldn't eat it. 

Consequently, I don't posses innate knowledge of which sauce goes best with which fish, and simply decided to throw everything I had together. That almost always works right?

This time it definitely DID!

I made up a black sesame sauce by mixing the said ground sesame, soy sauce, sugar, and rice vinegar. The result was a syrupy sauce that tasted great with the salmon. 

And, to my surprise, the salmon was seared just fine. I coated the two steaks in normal sesame seeds beforehand to add a little crunch, which didn't really change anything in the end.

Only problem is, it was all ready for 9:30 and my doorbell didn't ring before 10... I should have entitled my post "COLD Salmon & Black Sesame", but oh well. At least I'm now reassured as to my fish-cooking skills, and am proud to say I am no longer traumatized! (by fish, at least--don't get me started on other phobias)

Black Sesame Sauce

30 gr ground black sesame seeds

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

3 tablespoons sugar

5 tablespoons soy sauce