The Greatest Cedar Plank Salmon

Folks. FOLKS. We're doing cedar plank salmon. The greatest cedar plank salmon in the history of cedar plank salmon. The Pacific Northwest has been doing this for thousands of years — the indigenous peoples up there figured this out long before the so-called 'food influencers' showed up with their ring lights and their tripods, total embarrassments, the influencers — and the Bigly version, the one I'm giving you today, beats every single one of them. Every one. It's not even close. It's a slaughter.

Here's what cedar plank salmon does that nothing else does. The wood — the CEDAR, the actual cedar plank — soaks in water, then it goes on the grill, then it starts to SMOLDER, and that smoke, that beautiful aromatic cedar smoke, kisses the salmon from underneath while the top gets glazed by the sweet maple-mustard brushstroke I'm about to teach you. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, a SPIRITUAL experience. People eat this salmon and they reconsider their lives. They quit their jobs. They call their mothers. They say, 'Mom, I had Bigly's cedar plank salmon and I want to live differently now.' It happens. It happens all the time.

And the salmon — this is important — has to be WILD. Not farmed. Farmed salmon is a sad gray paste they dye orange with a color chart, you can look this up, the dye companies make BILLIONS, it's one of the great scandals of our time and the major newspapers won't touch it. Wild Pacific sockeye, king, or coho. Beautiful fish. Strong fish. Fish that lived a life. Believe me, you can taste the difference, and once you taste the real thing you will NEVER go back.

And that's how you do salmon. Real salmon. Salmon that tastes like the woods and the sea had a baby and the baby was DELICIOUS. The cedar gives it a backbone. The glaze gives it a soul. The grill gives it the kind of char only fire knows how to give — fire is the original chef, fire has been cooking longer than any of us, give fire the respect it deserves. Serve this with anything: roasted potatoes, a green salad, plain rice, doesn't matter. The salmon is the star. The salmon is always the star. OK? OK.