Now that summer is here, the most popular way to cook salmon is definitely to grill it. But if you’ve ever been disappointed with dried-out grilled salmon, you’re not alone! Salmon seems to go from underdone to chalky and sour tasting in the blink of an eye on the high heat of a grill.

Today we’re bringing you a great technique for grilling salmon from Susie Bulloch of HeyGrillHey. It’s flavorful, succulent, flaky and, if you follow our temperature tips, perfectly cooked.

Problems with grilling salmon—or any other fish!

There is no doubt that grilled salmon is a delicious dish, but grilling fish is fraught with problems. The problem partly lies in the temptation to heat up your grill until it’s blazing hot and toss on your salmon fillet. But because of how easily fish dries out, that method often ends up as sad, overcooked fish.

Fish myosin and its fellow fiber proteins are more sensitive to heat than their land-animal counterparts. Where meat begins to shrink from coagulation and major fluid loss at 140°F/60°C, most fish shrink at 120°F/50°C and begin to become dry around 140°F/60°C…. In practice, it’s all too easy to overshoot the ideal temperature range for fish.

—Harold McGee On Food and Cooking, pp 209–211

But drying isn’t the only problem. Salmon can also easily be ruined by the skin or flesh sticking to the grill. Not only does this ruin your fish’s presentation, but not being able to get the fish free from the grill to turn it over or even serve it makes overcooking more likely as you struggle to free the flesh without mangling it.

A note on salmon doneness temps

The USDA recommends cooking salmon to a this-fish-is-dry temperature of 145°F (63°C) for food safety. However, most chefs recommend cooking salmon to a much lower temp, 125°F (52°C). If your salmon has been previously frozen (as much of it is), that low temp is amazing and will yield a custardy, silky-textured fish. However, fresh, never-frozen salmon often has roundworm parasites in it that you want to be sure to kill before eating, and that’s where the higher USDA temp comes into play. This creates a sad paradox, wherein you should overcook fish you have just caught, but fish you bought at the grocer is fine to cook to a lower, better temp. The fish we used in this recipe was fresh, never-frozen, so we cooked it to a higher temperature.

The fish grilling solution: indirect heat

Flaky, tender fish is obviously our goal. Susie Bulloch suggests a great method for grilling it without the drying or the sticking.

It turns out that indirect heat is one of the easiest ways to get your grilled fish just right. By cooking the fish indirectly, you have a better shot of hitting the 135–140°F (57–60°C) pull temperature that is so important.

Of course, you’ll actually need to know what temp the fish has reached, so use a leave-in probe thermometer like the ChefAlarm^® to track the cook and alert you when the pull temp is reached. Of course, checking the final temp with an instant-read like the Thermapen^® is essential to make sure you get the doneness just right.

As for the problem of the skin sticking, by cooking the fish more gently, the proteins in the fish skin will coagulate more slowly, thus gripping the metal of the grill less tightly. And if it does stick a little, it won’t burn in the time it takes you to get it free.

Of course, if you scrub and oil your grill grates before you cook the fish you’ll be even more likely to avoid sticking.

Seasoning salmon

Salmon’s rich flavor plays well with so many flavors. It’s great brushed with teriyaki sauce, amazing with just salt and pepper, and fun with barbecue sauce. And by all means, use any of those flavors for this technique!

But for this recipe, in particular, we go super classic with lemon zest and dill (already good friends with each other) blended together with a hint of garlic in a bath of olive oil. This paste is smeared all over the meat of the fish, imparting deep, bright flavor that just sings of summertime.