Salmon skin

Salmon skin is the silvery-grey outer skin of the fish — Japanese sake no kawa — together with the band of soft, omega-3-rich subcutaneous fat that lies directly beneath it. Rubbery and unappealing raw, it is the part cooks chase for one reason: scaled, dried and given fierce dry heat, it renders its fat, its collagen tightens and browns, and it crisps into a shattering, deeply savoury cracker — the crackling on a pan-seared fillet, the chip in a salmon-skin roll.