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Here's The Deal With That White Stuff Oozing Out Of Your Salmon

Don’t let albumin ruin your next dinner.
Fresh coho salmon cooking on an outdoor grill, Juneau, Alaska, USA
wanderluster via Getty Images
Fresh coho salmon cooking on an outdoor grill, Juneau, Alaska, USA

We hate to be the ones to tell you this, but the white stuff oozing out of your cooked salmon is almost impossible to prevent. Don’t feel bad, it happens to everyone. The good news, we’re going to tell you how to keep it at a minimum.

First, let’s get to the bottom of what that stuff is. The totally harmless (but wholly unappetizing) white gunk that seeps out of salmon filets as they cook is just coagulated protein — also known as albumin. (To clarify, the correct spelling is albumin with an “i.” You may have also heard of albumen, with an “e,” but albumen is the term for egg whites. They’re two different things.)

This sounds bad, but it’s absolutely safe. Albumin gets pushed out of the muscle fibers of fish as it cooks, coagulating at the surface. This will happen to all salmon, no matter how you cook it. It has been hypothesized that the way you cook salmon — how hot and how long — is the reason albumin seeps out, but this is not true.

America’s Test Kitchen tested the cooking theory AND talked to Donald Kramer — a professor of seafood science at the University of Alaska — and concluded that the way you cook fish will not stop albumin from collecting at the surface. It’s going to happen no matter what, to some degree. But don’t despair, they did find a way to significantly minimize the collection of albumin: a quick brine.

Just 10 minutes in a basic brine solution (about 1 tablespoon of salt per cup of water) before cooking results in less white stuff oozing out. According to America’s Test Kitchen, this is because “the salt partially dissolves the muscle fibers near the surface of the flesh, so that when cooked they congeal without contracting and squeezing out albumin.”

Problem solved.

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