Introducing Baker River salmon

Baker River salmon might be the best — and most sustainable — salmon you’ve never heard of before.

The rich, red-fleshed wild sockeye are fished by tribal gillnetters on the Baker River, a tributary of the Skagit River. Their brief season is expected to start mid-June in 2025, in an exclusive retail partnership with PCC.

“It’s a micro fishery, and it’s about quality, not quantity,” said Ian Kirouac, director of Lummi Island Wild, the company that partners with the Upper Skagit Tribe to distribute the salmon.

“I’d put them up against any salmon out there in a blind taste test and expect to win every single time.”

what is Baker River salmon?

Baker River salmon are also a welcome bright spot in the world of sustainable fisheries.

The river’s fishery was nearly extinct by the 1980s. Dams built in 1927 and then 1958 had blocked salmon and steelhead from reaching the freshwater habitat that their life cycle requires, vastly diminishing their numbers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

By 1985, only 99 adult sockeyes returned to the river. “The Upper Skagit tribe worked to get all the stakeholders to the table,” Kirouac said. While the river remains dammed, used for hydroelectric power, the fishery has returned to commercial viability over the decades. Fish now swim into traps and are literally trucked around the dams and released on the opposite side. Between 30,000 and 50,000 fish are now caught during the roughly month-long season, which typically starts mid-June.

“The Native fishery that manages it is so precise that they literally start a clock and sound a horn,” said Erik Lind, PCC’s meat and seafood merchandiser. The fish are at PCC stores within 48 hours of harvest.

Each fishing family, typically with three or four generations on board the boat, has just seven minutes from the time the horn goes off to set their nets and collect the brilliantly red-fleshed fish. “The reason that’s important and powerful is because all the fish they will catch in that seven minutes are alive,” said Kirouac. Unlike many other fishing setups, where nets are set and left for long periods, the fish aren’t struggling and releasing lactic acid and adrenaline in their system for hours, or dying in the nets. The setup also means there is very little inadvertent bycatch, because fish unintentionally caught up in the nets can be released alive.

Fishers then cut a gill on each fish and place them in an ice and water slurry to bleed out, which is believed to stress the fish less than other methods and to improve the taste and texture. They’re immediately delivered to Lummi Island for processing.

“It’s epic, the way they take care of these fish and the way they manage the stock,” Lind said.

The Baker River salmon are noteworthy for flavor as well as their story.

“When we’re talking about quality, it all starts with fat content,” Kirouac said–the “smart fats” considered heart-healthy as well as succulent.

Other well-regarded wild sockeyes average a 9% fat content, he said. Baker Rivers are above 15%.

Adding in the specialized handling, “that’s why they taste great.”

About Lummi Island Wild

Lummi Island Wild is well-known in the region for its own reefnet fishing operation, one of the few remaining in the world and, working with Lummi tribal members,  considered one of the most sustainable global fishing operations.  (It’s also the planet’s only solar-powered fishery, said Kirouac.)

In the reefnet system, spotters on towers sound an alert when salmon are swimming over the fishery’s small suspended nets. It’s raised up when the alert is called, with live fish rolled to the side into a netted well, where any bycatch can be immediately removed and returned to open water.

Kirouac’s careful not to speak for tribal members, but said almost all the company’s tribal partners “will tell you that fishing is not just a livelihood, it’s a way of life.” Some Baker River salmon is kept for sustenance, Lummi Island Wild has been its only purveyor for more than a decade.

“A lot of the time, seafood companies are just buying and selling fish like stocks and bonds, and that’s not the way we do it at all. We’re on the water…We can tell you everything about these fish — we can tell you the fisher that caught it, when it came out of the water.”

How to cook Baker River salmon

To cook Baker River salmon, Ian Kirouac says to keep it simple.

“It doesn’t need any help.”

Cook the salmon with its skin on, even if you don’t plan to eat the skin, “because there’s a wonderful layer of fat in there that you’re going to want the benefit of cooking it in.”

Unless your diet precludes salt, he says to add a good dose — “salmon can handle aggressive salt” — and then put it on the grill for perhaps 10-14 minutes (thicker fillets take longer to cook.)

If you’re looking for more, try PCC’s recipes for spice-rubbed wild salmon, rosemary grilled salmon and grilled salmon bistro salad.