20 Trout Recipes to Try Now

Top Chef Season 15 winner Joe Flamm wowed judges with this simple but virtuosic dish of pan-seared trout with garlic and chanterelle mushrooms. In his quick-cooking dish, crunchy breadcrumbs cling to seared chanterelles and garlic atop delicate trout in a pool of buttery white wine sauce.

Trout and summer savory form an ideal marriage. Both are mild-mannered, so they blend beautifully, neither upstaging the other. Serve the dish with equally mellow vegetables, such as buttered green beans and grilled or roasted potatoes.

Smoked fish – already cooked and intensely flavorful – is an ideal addition to dishes when time is of the essence. We've used trout here, but another flaky fish, such as haddock or whitefish, would work just as well.

Smoked trout is the star of this simple, fresh appetizer. It's gently tossed with tomato, avocado, and lime juice, then spooned onto corn chips and garnished with chives.

In this elegant tartare from chef Larry Feldmeier, buttery soft fresh trout is combined with fennel, red onion, yellow bell pepper, and cucumber, then coated in a bold dressing spiked with bright flavors like lime and ginger. Golden yuzu tobiko and crispy puffed rice top the dish off.

A simple garlic-and-herb-infused oil combined with wine vinegar acts as both a basting liquid and a sauce for the fish. The trout skin protects the flesh and turns an appealing golden brown during grilling.

"In this recipe, I lean on Kashmiri chiles for their bright red lycopenic color. These chiles are mild in their heat level and are only sold dry," says cookbook author Nik Sharma. If you can't find them, substitute another dried red chile of your choice. Serve the fish with warm rice, a light salad, and lemon or lime wedges to squeeze over the top.

"This dish is almost a cliché in Navarra, but it's absolutely delicious," says chef Alex Raij about this Spanish trout preparation. "The Spanish ham keeps the fish from drying out, basting it with its inimitable fat."

At Racines in New York City, chef Diego Moya served confit trout with an almond oil, apricot kernel vinegar, and honey vinaigrette with tart underripe peaches. This homage leans on store-bought smoked trout and aged sherry vinegar for a weeknight-friendly dish.

Inspired by the classic combination of bagels with lox and cream cheese, chef Tory Miller devised this variation using smoked, locally raised trout and homemade English muffins. It would be equally good on other breads, such as a baguette or even the bagel that inspired it.

This recipe is modeled after the Japanese dish Unagi Kabayaki — grilled eel. Since eel is fairly hard to find, we've substituted trout, which is a bit leaner than eel but similar in flavor. It pairs excellently with a lightly sweet, full-bodied Riesling. 

Chef David Bouley uses a mix of wild mushroom scraps to infuse the pine nut sauce that tops his seared trout. Home cooks can make a pine nut dressing for trout using dried porcinis plumped in the microwave.

Lightly curing the trout in salt, sugar, and crushed spices firms the fish, and infuses it with flavor before it's served with a bright and tangy lime juice dressing. Substitute the spring onions with thinly sliced red or white onions, rinsed in cold water to mellow their sharper bite.

Vadouvan is a curry spice blend combining curry leaves, mustard seeds, shallots, and garlic. At his GT Fish & Oyster restaurant in Chicago, chef Giuseppe Tentori tops vadouvan lentils with Tasmanian ocean trout. Any saison-style beer would be a great match for this dish.

For cookbook author and food historian Karla Vasquez's recipe, Worcestershire sauce — a frequent find in Salvadoran condiment drawers — teams up with mustard to create a punchy, umami-packed crust. Delicate, meltingly tender whole trout gets crispy skin from a quick sear in a cast-iron skillet.

Oyster, beech, and shiitake mushrooms cook alongside fatty, succulent steelhead trout fillets in a bath of steam from the Shaoxing wine simmering in the wok beneath the steamer. Serve the fish alongside cooked rice to soak up the aromatic sauce.

Thinly sliced root vegetables like carrots, kohlrabi, and radishes make this salad bright and crisp. Topped with a luxe crème fraîche dressing and whole-grain mustard, then paired with smoked trout, this salad makes a crunchy and satisfying weeknight meal.

Lemon slices and a bounty of hardy herbs flavor these tender whole trout from the inside out, while toasted almonds provide a crunchy finish. Serve the roasted trout over a simple spring salad of arugula and thinly sliced fennel and radishes.

This quick dish from 2011 F&W Best New Chef Viet Pham features trout fillets in a bright and tangy vinaigrette made with cider vinegar, lemon juice, preserved lemon, minced shallot, and fish sauce. If you'd like to pair it with wine, a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is a lovely choice.

These smoky crisps are an ideal happy hour snack. To make them, simply bake smoked trout fillet skins until they're dry and crispy, then sprinkle with salt and/or Old Bay Seasoning.