Coconut Macadamia Crusted Salmon

Coconut macadamia crusted salmon is a quick dish featuring salmon fillets piled high with a macadamia nut, coconut, and panko topping. You don’t need many ingredients to pull together this healthy seafood recipe.

Well hello, January! Ready or not, full-fledged post-holiday winter is here. I’m not huge on resolutions, but I’m putting forth an effort to jazz up our mostly-healthy weeknight meals with new flavors.

Our go-to salmon recipe is this spicy baked orange salmon that I’ve shared before. YUM. But a discovery of leftover macadamia nuts in the cabinet from my last batch of lemon white chocolate macadamia nut cookies got the wheels turning.

Macadamia-crusted fish is something I tend to order in a restaurant – what’s to prevent me from making it at home? The answer is…nothing at all. It’s just one of those meals I love and then promptly forget about. 😂

Ingredients

This topping to this coconut macadamia crusted salmon is thick, crunchy, and so good! It includes:

• roughly ground macadamia nuts
• roughly ground unsweetened coconut flakes
• panko breadcrumbs
• melted coconut oil

The macadamia nuts add a rich flavor that pairs up well with the coconut. In a pinch I’ve used regular sweetened coconut, but I prefer unsweetened coconut. You’ll likely find them right alongside the ‘snowflake’ flaked coconut varieties in the baking aisle of the grocery store. They provide a coconut flavor more appropriate for a savory recipe like this salmon.

Also in a pinch I’ve used chopped up pecans instead of macadamia nuts, and that was good, too. Macadamia nuts certainly aren’t the cheapest, but you don’t need much here.

I like to use melted coconut oil here to enhance the coconut flavor (and keep this recipe dairy-free). I’ve also used olive oil and it works just fine. Just a slightly different flavor — you do you.

Instructions

Start by brushing your salmon with oil, seasoning it with some salt and pepper, and then squeezing lemon juice over top (not super mandatory but I like a little citrus in there). Then the next steps are determined by the thickness of your salmon fillets.

If you have a thicker piece of salmon (usually center-cut, around 1 1/2″ thick), you’ll want to bake it for a few minutes before adding the topping.

Reason being that the topping doesn’t need that long to toast up nice and golden brown. You’ll want to give a thick piece of salmon a head start cooking so the topping doesn’t become burnt by the time the fish is fully cooked.

If you have a thinner piece of salmon (closer to the tail end, around 1″ thick), the topping can be added right away and be just fine with a 12-15 minute cook time.

The big thing when cooking multiple fillets of fish is that you want them to be as close in thickness to each other as you can get them. That way they cook in the same time.

A general rule of a thumb to follow is that fish needs about six minutes of cook time (at 425°F) per every half-inch of thickness, plus an extra minute or two, as needed.

An instant-read thermometer takes the guesswork out of seeing when it’s fully cooked, which will be when the salmon easily flakes and is solid pink throughout. Using a thermometer also helps prevent against overcooking salmon, which can make it dry.

Per foodsafety.gov guidance, salmon is fully cooked when it reaches 145°F in the thickest part. It’ll have firmed up and become perfectly flaky.

Recipe notes

• Use unsweetened coconut flakes instead of the sweetened, “snowflake” coconut. The unsweetened flakes are drier and (obviously) not sweet. Once given a quick whiz or two in the food processor they’ll be the perfect size to blend into the topping and provide a hint of coconut flavor without any unnecessary sweetness.
• If you’d rather not use macadamia nuts (or don’t have them), pecans work great, too.