Miso Salmon Rice Bowl

Tender, meaty and gingery Miso-Glazed Salmon is the star of this fragrant, healthy and satisfying salmon rice bowl that tastes like the fanciest spa food but is definitely easier on the wallet and just might be healthier, too! Homemade recipes always are, right? What makes this recipe so special and so delicious? Start with a major umami bomb: Miso salmon! First, salmon is marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and miso, and then cooked to perfection. While it marinates, you’ll whip up a batch of fluffy white rice that’s flavored with scallions and even more ginger. Bring it all together, add a few healthy, green toppings, and dig in. 

Key Ingredients

For the miso salmon

• Salmon: Buy a piece of salmon that looks good (or ask the fishmonger what’s best today!) — bright color, clear eyes (if you can see them) and so on. We’re partial to sockeye when we can get it, but whatever is fresh (or looks like it’s been handled with care) is great.
• Miso paste: White miso paste is widely available now in the U.S., and we’re so glad! It lasts a long time in the fridge, too, so even though this recipe only uses 2 tablespoons of miso paste, you’ll find plenty of uses for it. We love to add it to vinaigrettes, or try using it to make our Miso Meatball Bowl or Miso-Ginger Slaw.
• Sesame oil: Once of our favorite things to do with leftover rice from takeout dinners is just warm it up and drizzle it with soy sauce and sesame oil. Rich and nutty, even a little drop of sesame oil gives so much flavor.
• Soy sauce: It’s OK to use gluten-free tamari, if you’d like to keep this recipe GF.
• Rice vinegar : A bit sweet, rice vinegar adds a really key sweet tang to the miso salmon marinade. It’s also easy to find at the grocery store — check in the Asian food aisle, where you’d buy soy sauce or sriracha.
• Brown sugar: Light or brown, either is fine. This helps the salmon get a gorgeously sticky, slightly crisp edge when you broil it.
• Ginger: Never enough fresh ginger for our palates! Try grating it with a microplane to get really fine, nearly-juiced ginger bits that will meld nicely into the marinade.  

For the rice bowl

• Short grain white rice: Sometimes labeled ‘sushi rice,’ short grain white rice is more starchy than long-grain varieties and we love to use it for rice bowl recipes like our Salmon Sushi Bowl or our simple, healthy Salmon Bowl. While you could make Plain White Rice as the base of this bowl recipe if you wanted to, we think that seasoning it with fresh garlic, scallions and oil is a low-lift way to add a lot of joy to meal time! It makes this salmon rice bowl really feel like some kind of magic — if you’ve got it in you, make the fancy rice!
• Avocado oil: The oil keeps the starchy rice from being too sticky, and while you could skip it if you really needed to, it’s also fine to just swap in whatever oil you have handy; Olive oil or most any vegetable oil would work fine.
• Cucumbers: We prefer to use Persian cucumbers so that we don’t have to mess around with peeling. 
• Avocado: Creamy and rich, every rice bowl must have avocado on it.
• Furikake: The exact mix of ingredients in furikake varies a little bit brand-to-brand, but this Japanese seasoning is usually some mixture of spices along with bonito flakes (dried tuna flakes), seaweed and sesame seeds. It’s a textural joy — a lot of little tiny crunchies — and flavor-wise it’s wonderfully savory, salty, nutty and sometimes spicy. You could make this bowl without it, but WHY would you do that?  It’s easy to find everywhere now, too; they even sell it at Trader Joe’s. 

How To Make This Rice Bowl, Step-By-Step

1. Marinate the salmon. The Miso-Glazed Salmon has to marinate for about an hour; a little more or a little less is fine.
2. Make the seasoned rice. By tossing some scallions and ginger in the water along with the white rice it takes on a really heavenly quality.
3. Bake the salmon. It’ll take about 10 minutes under a hot broiler.
4. Put it all together! A big spoonful of rice goes in the bottom of the bowl, top it with a piece of salmon, and arrange the cukes and avocado around it. Sprinkle with furikake and eat up!  

Tips for Meal-Prepping & Serving

You can easily make the salmon ahead of time, and simply warm it a little if you want to, or serve it cold over the warm rice as an ideal, easy meal for a hot day. If you’re serving this recipe to kids or guests with a lot of different dietary needs or preferences, it can be nice to lay out all the elements of the bowl and let everyone assemble their own. And if you want to offer even more toppings than we have in the recipe….

Topping Ideas + Variations

You could take this bowl in so many directions, and after you’ve made this basic recipe a few times, you’ll probably want to get creative with the toppings — we say, go for it! Try serving this bowl topped with: 

• Thinly-sliced radishes
• Swap some Asian Cucumber Salad in for the fresh cucumber slices
• Fresh snap peas
• Perfectly ripe cherry tomatoes
• Baby Bok Choy
• Pickled ginger
• Edamame
• Roasted Broccoli 

More Rice Bowl Goodness This Way

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