How Cedar Planks Turned Me Into the Salmon Guy

I used to be a burger and dogs guy. That was my lane at every family reunion, every church potluck, every Fourth of July since I was old enough to hold tongs. Nobody asked me to bring fish, and honestly, I never offered. My track record with salmon was two things: dry as a shoe and stuck to the grates so bad I had to scrape it off with a spatula while everybody pretended not to notice.

That changed at my wife's family reunion two summers ago, out at her cousin's place on the lake. Her uncle Ray, who has smoked meat for forty years and doesn't hand out compliments easy, brought a cooler with a stack of wooden planks soaking in it. I asked him what in the world he was doing. He said, 'Cedar planks, Dale. You lay the salmon right on the wood. Wood does the work, you just don't mess it up.'

I watched him do it from start to finish. He soaked those Grill Gourmet cedar grilling planks for about an hour in water weighted down with a dinner plate so they wouldn't float. Then he laid the fillets skin-side down right on top, closed the lid, and let the smoke do its business. No flipping. No sticking. No standing over the grill white-knuckling a spatula while thirty people wait on their plates.

Forty minutes later he pulled that plank off the grill, still smoking a little at the edges, salmon flaking apart under a fork, and set it in the middle of the table like it was nothing. Twenty-some family members went through that fish in about six minutes flat. My mother-in-law, who has never once complimented anything I've cooked in fifteen years, asked me if I was going to get some of those planks myself. I told her I would before I'd even thought it through.

Uncle Ray didn't teach me a recipe that day. He handed me a piece of wood and told me to stop overthinking it.

I ordered the same twelve-pack of Made in USA Grill Gourmet cedar grilling planks he'd used before we even left the lake house. My phone signal out there was garbage, so I sat in the truck for ten minutes just to get the order to go through. That's how sure I was I needed to fix my fish game before the next family get-together, and I didn't want to give myself the chance to talk myself out of it once I got home.

The first time I tried it myself, I overcomplicated it, because that's what I do. I bought a fancy rub, a citrus glaze, the works. Turned out none of that mattered near as much as the plank itself. The wood soaked up water for an hour, took the direct heat off the fish, and let just enough smoke curl up through the flesh that the salmon tasted like it had been sitting in a smokehouse all day instead of forty minutes on my regular gas grill in the driveway.

My daughter Emma, who won't eat fish unless it's breaded and fried, ate two full pieces off that first Grill Gourmet plank and asked when I was making it again. My neighbor Tom, who has a smoker the size of a small car, leaned over the fence to ask what I was doing that smelled so good. I told him straight, a soaked piece of cedar and a fillet of salmon. He didn't believe it was that simple until I showed him the plank still sitting on my grill, edges charred, smoke still rising off it.

Since that reunion, I have made plank salmon for probably fifteen cookouts. I keep three or four Grill Gourmet planks soaking in a cooler on the porch most Saturdays from May through September now, same way Ray does. Each plank holds up through one good cook, sometimes two if you're careful with it, and I've never had a piece of fish stick to the grates since I made the switch. That alone was worth it to me, because scraping burnt fish skin off a grate at the end of a cookout is not how I want to spend my evening.

I'm not going to tell you a piece of wood changed my life. It didn't. But it changed my Saturdays. It changed what people expect from me at a cookout. Nobody asks if I'm bringing burgers anymore. They ask if I'm bringing the salmon, and half the time somebody brings their own cooler just to take a plank home with them so they can try it.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you're the burger and dogs guy like I was, I'm not telling you to give that up. I'm telling you to add one more thing to your rotation. Soak a plank the night before, or that morning if you remember, lay your salmon on it plain or dressed up however you like, and let the grill do what it does. You don't need to be Uncle Ray. You just need the wood to work for you instead of against you. That's really all this was, and it's the only reason I've got a reputation to protect now instead of a spatula covered in stuck-on fish skin and a family that quietly steered clear of my cooking whenever fish was on the menu.